Step 1:  Prerequisites

Since my VPS runs Ubuntu Linux 9.10, there are a few packages to install before we get started.  Run the following command to install them:

sudo apt-get install python-setuptools acl python-dev spawn-fcgi

Now you need to make sure your main partition has the acl system enabled in /etc/fstab.  Modify the partition options to look something like this:

# /etc/fstab: static file system information.
#
# <file system> <mount point>   <type>  <options>       <dump>  <pass>
proc            /proc           proc    defaults        0       0
/dev/xvda       /               ext3    noatime,errors=remount-ro,acl 0       1
/dev/xvdb       none            swap    sw              0       0

Pay attention to that acl option in the default partition above.  Now you can just remount the partition:

sudo mount -o remount,acl /

Step 2:  Install Mercurial and flup

Mercurial is obvious, but flup might be new to you.  Flup is a python module that allows us to create a WSGI server to host the repositories.

sudo easy_install mercurial
sudo easy_install flup

Step 3:  Create a user account to hold your repositories

I prefer to place my repositories underneath a normal user account and then add www-data and myself to the group.  Here are the commands to set it all up:

sudo /usr/sbin/groupadd hg
sudo /usr/sbin/useradd -g hg -s /bin/false hg
sudo mkdir /var/hg
sudo chown hg:hg /var/hg
sudo /usr/sbin/usermod -G hg www-data
sudo /usr/sbin/usermod -G hg scott

The next part deserves a little bit of explaining.  Basically the whole /var/hg folder should be owned by the group hg that we just created.  But what we need to ensure three things.  First, the hg group should have write permissions to the root folder.  Second, we need to make sure that any new files created under this folder will belong to the group hg also.  And third, we need to make sure that the default permissions for this folder are read/write for the owner and the group.  These two commands will ensure each of these rules is followed, which is why we added the acl package earlier and remounted the main filesystem.

I’m sure there are other ways to accomplish this (like running Nginx and the FastCGI process as the hg user), but this is the method I prefer, and it saves a lot of headaches down the road dealing with why a push won’t go.  So here are the three commands you need to execute:

sudo chmod -R g+rwxs,o+rx /var/hg
sudo setfacl -R -m d:u::rwx,d:g::rwx,d:m:rwx,d:o:r-x /var/hg

Step 4:  Create the hgwebdir.cgi script

This script is used to serve the incoming requests for the FastCGI interface, mine is /opt/hg-fastcgi/hgwebdir.fcgi

#!/usr/bin/env python
#
# An example CGI script to export multiple hgweb repos, edit as necessary

# adjust python path if not a system-wide install:
#import sys
#sys.path.insert(0, "/path/to/python/lib")

# enable demandloading to reduce startup time
from mercurial import demandimport; demandimport.enable()

# Uncomment to send python tracebacks to the browser if an error occurs:
#import cgitb
#cgitb.enable()

# If you'd like to serve pages with UTF-8 instead of your default
# locale charset, you can do so by uncommenting the following lines.
# Note that this will cause your .hgrc files to be interpreted in
# UTF-8 and all your repo files to be displayed using UTF-8.
#
#import os
#os.environ["HGENCODING"] = "UTF-8"

from mercurial.hgweb.hgwebdir_mod import hgwebdir
from flup.server.fcgi import WSGIServer

# The config file looks like this.  You can have paths to individual
# repos, collections of repos in a directory tree, or both.
#
# [paths]
# virtual/path1 = /real/path1
# virtual/path2 = /real/path2
# virtual/root = /real/root/*
# / = /real/root2/*
#
# [collections]
# /prefix/to/strip/off = /root/of/tree/full/of/repos
#
# paths example:
#
# * First two lines mount one repository into one virtual path, like
# '/real/path1' into 'virtual/path1'.
#
# * The third entry tells every mercurial repository found in
# '/real/root', recursively, should be mounted in 'virtual/root'. This
# format is preferred over the [collections] one, using absolute paths
# as configuration keys is not supported on every platform (including
# Windows).
#
# * The last entry is a special case mounting all repositories in
# '/real/root2' in the root of the virtual directory.
#
# collections example: say directory tree /foo contains repos /foo/bar,
# /foo/quux/baz.  Give this config section:
#   [collections]
#   /foo = /foo
# Then repos will list as bar and quux/baz.
#
# Alternatively you can pass a list of ('virtual/path', '/real/path') tuples
# or use a dictionary with entries like 'virtual/path': '/real/path'

WSGIServer(hgwebdir('/var/hg/hgweb.config')).run()

Make sure you set this script as executable with the following command:

chmod +x /opt/hg-fastcgi/hgwebdir.fcgi

Step 5:  Create the Mercurial hgweb.config

There’s a simple INI-style config file we have to create.  I called mine /var/hg/hgweb.config.  If you decide to place yours elsewhere, you need to modify the last line of the hgwebdir.fcgi script you created in step 4.

[web]
baseurl = /
allow_push = *
push_ssl = false

[collections]
/var/hg = /var/hg

Step 6:  Create the FastCGI init.d script

This script will not only handle starting and stopping your FastCGI process for Mercurial; it will also handle restarting the service on reboot.  Make sure you save this as /etc/init.d/fcgi-hg.

#! /bin/sh
#
# fcgi-hg     Startup script for the nginx HTTP Server
#
# chkconfig: - 84 15
# description: Loading php-cgi using spawn-cgi
#	       HTML files and CGI.
#
# Author:  Ryan Norbauer <ryan.norbauer@gmail.com>
# Modified:     Geoffrey Grosenbach http://topfunky.com
# Modified:     David Krmpotic http://davidhq.com
# Modified:	Kun Xi http://kunxi.org
PATH=/opt/python/bin:$PATH
DAEMON=/usr/bin/spawn-fcgi
FCGIHOST=127.0.0.1
FCGIPORT=9003
FCGIUSER=www-data
FCGIGROUP=www-data
FCGIAPP=/opt/hg-fastcgi/hgwebdir.fcgi
PIDFILE=/var/run/fcgi-hg.pid
DESC="HG in FastCGI mode"

# Gracefully exit if the package has been removed.
test -x $DAEMON || exit 0
test -x $FCGIAPP || exit 0

start() {
	$DAEMON -a $FCGIHOST -p $FCGIPORT -u $FCGIUSER -g $FCGIGROUP -f $FCGIAPP -P $PIDFILE 2> /dev/null || echo -en "\n already running"
}

stop() {
	kill -QUIT `cat $PIDFILE` || echo -en "\n not running"
}

restart() {
	kill -HUP `cat $PIDFILE` || echo -en "\n can't reload"
}

case "$1" in
  start)
    echo -n "Starting $DESC: "
    start
  ;;
  stop)
    echo -n "Stopping $DESC: "
    stop
  ;;
  restart|reload)
    echo -n "Restarting $DESC: "
    stop
    # One second might not be time enough for a daemon to stop,
    # if this happens, d_start will fail (and dpkg will break if
    # the package is being upgraded). Change the timeout if needed
    # be, or change d_stop to have start-stop-daemon use --retry.
    # Notice that using --retry slows down the shutdown process somewhat.
    sleep 1
    start
  ;;
  *)
    echo "Usage: $SCRIPTNAME {start|stop|restart|reload}" >&2
    exit 3
  ;;
esac

exit $?

Now you need to update the rc.d directories so this service will start when you reboot your box.  This simple command will do it for you:

update-rc.d fcgi-hg defaults

Now you’ll be able to start and stop your service like this:

/etc/init.d/fcgi-hg start
/etc/init.d/fcgi-hg stop
/etc/init.d/fcgi-hg restart

Step 7:  Create hguser.config for user setup

I prefer not to keep my repositories open to everyone (for obvious reasons) so we need to create an htpasswd-style user configuration file.  Note that since this will be used for basic authentication, credentials will be sent in plain text.  If that matters to you, then you should configure your Nginx install to use SSL, but this is outside the scope of this article.  Anyway, onward.  You should put this file at /var/hg/hguser.config

# Format <user>:<encrypted-password>:<comment>
scott:myencryptedpassword:Scott Anderson

Obviously you need to replace the username with your username, and the password with an appropriately encrypted value.  If you have Ruby installed, this is easy, just launch irb and type the following command:

"password".crypt("salt")

Copy the encrypted value into the file and you’re all set.

Step 8:  Modify your Nginx configuration

There are about 100 ways to setup websites in Nginx, so I’ll assume you know where to place server sections.  If you followed my previous tutorial, this will be in a file something like /usr/local/nginx/sites-enabled/geeksharp.com.  The block should look something like this:

server {
    listen 80;
    server_name dev.geeksharp.com;
    root /var/hg/;
    gzip on;

    location / {
        include fastcgi_params;
        fastcgi_pass 127.0.0.1:9003;
        fastcgi_param DOCUMENT_ROOT /var/hg/;
        fastcgi_param QUERY_STRING $query_string;
        fastcgi_param REQUEST_METHOD $request_method;
        fastcgi_param CONTENT_TYPE $content_type;
        fastcgi_param CONTENT_LENGTH $content_length;
        fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME /opt/hg-fastcgi/hgwebdir.fcgi;
        auth_basic 'geek# Source Control';
        auth_basic_user_file /var/hg/hgusers.config;
    }
}

That’s it!  You can edit all these miscellaneous files to suit your needs.  If you did everything correctly, all you need to do is start the fcgi-hg script and then restart nginx.  When you want to create a new repository, you should create it in /var/hg like so:

hg init /var/hg/project

Once you get everything running and you create a few repositories, you should see something like this:

Hope this helps someone out there.  If you have questions, or something doesn’t work, let me know and I try and help you out.  Good luck!

As you know, I swapped my Windows development environment for Mac OSX, and so far learning Rails has been a great pleasure thanks to Agile Web Development with Rails (Third Edition) from The Pragmatic Programmers.  When I found this alternate method for installing ruby-debug-ide I decided to fire up my Windows 7 VM and give it a go.  Here are the gems I have currently installed on my VM:

To get this working on my VM, here’s the steps I followed:

1. Install Ruby 1.9.1 from RubyInstaller.org.  When you run the installer, make sure you pay attention to the checkboxes under the install path and check both of them:
   
2. Now that you have Ruby installed, you need to get the devkit package from Rubyforge.  You should see an archive in the “Development Kit” section of that page.  The current version as of this writing is 3.4.5r3 (20091110).
3. Once you have the archive, you’ll need 7-zip to decompress it, so go get it and install it.
4. When you open the archive in 7-zip, click the Extract button and make sure you extract it to wherever you installed Ruby.  In my case this was C:\Ruby19.
   
5. The last step is to make the devkit fstab file point to the proper Ruby folders.  The fstab file is underneath your Ruby install.  Mine was located at C:\Ruby19\devkit\msys\1.0.11\etc\fstab.  Just open this file in notepad and change it.
   
6. Now the devkit is installed properly, all you have to do is open up a command prompt (make sure you Run As Administrator) and type the following commands (if you want to get the same gems as me):

   gem install rails
   gem install mongrel
   gem install cucumber
   gem install rspec
   gem install ruby-debug-ide

That’s it!  If you run into any weird issues, let me know in the comments.  Enjoy your new Windows-based Ruby on Rails development environment running the latest and greatest Ruby 1.9.1!

In the spirit of truly immersing myself in Rails development, I’ve come to realize that even though it’s 100% possible to write Rails applications on Windows, the experience is less than ideal.  I’m sure some of you out there are very successful Rails developers using Windows as your primary OS and more power to you!  But this is my journey, and I feel like I really should use the best-of-breed development environment for the task at hand, and Windows just isn’t going to cut it.  So… I decided that OSX was the best for me.  It seems like the vast majority of the Rails community uses OSX for development, and I don’t mind following in their well-established footsteps!

“But wait!,” I hear you say, “Aren’t you a .NET developer, and don’t you have production websites running on ASP.NET MVC?”  Ah, yes, my fair reader, you are correct!  But in today’s world of virtualization, especially on an OSX host, there’s no reason you can’t run your entire .NET development environment inside a beefy VM, and my main machine is definitely beefy enough to handle it!  See for yourself:

On my main machine, I’m actually running Snow Leopard now.  I installed OSX 10.6 from a retail DVD (thanks Apple Store!) and I’m loving every minute of it.  My virtual machine is a Windows 7 32-bit install with the “Windows Classic” theme because it honestly looks cleaner to me.  VMWare Fusion makes all of this possible, and I couldn’t be happier.  My performance is rock solid, so far.  And the best part is, now I can work in the best .NET environment through sweet virtualization, and the best Rails environment because let’s face it:  TextMate on OSX is sexy as hell:

If there’s interest in a more specific outline of how I got all this set up, I could definitely make a “How To” post or maybe a screencast that details everything.

Before I get going with NetBeans, I want to make sure my Ruby environment is ready.  The version of Ruby I have installed is from the one-click installer on ruby-lang.org.  The current version is 1.8.6 and it’s about 25 MB.  During installation, it will give you the opportunity to install rubygems, and I always check that box.  Once the installer is finished, you will notice that the “gem” and “ruby” executables have been added to your path.  There are 3 packages that need to be installed after that to get your Rails environment ready:

gem install rails
gem install mongrel
gem install sqlite3-ruby

You’ll get a lot of various “No definition” warnings when installing sqlite3-ruby which can safely be ignored.  When I’m developing locally, I tend to use sqlite3 for my Rails databases because it’s quick and painless.  I also prefer the Mongrel webserver over the default WEBrick because it’s much faster.

Now that Ruby on Rails is ready, I loaded up NetBeans for the first time.  One of the nice things about NetBeans is that it detected my default Rails environment almost immediately, however when examining the settings for this environment, I noticed that the “Classic Debugger” was installed:

When I tried to click the “Install Fast Debugger” button, gem spit out some nasty errors about not being able to build the packages from source.  The error it specifically stated that it couldn’t find nmake, despite the fact that I have Visual C++ 2008 Professional installed.  The fix for this error was easy.  I popped open a Visual Studio 2008 Command Prompt:

From this prompt, I attempted to install the package manually by running the following command:

gem install ruby-debug-ide

Which ultimately lead to this lovely error:

c:\ruby\lib\ruby\1.8\i386-mswin32\config.h(2) : fatal error C1189: #error :  MSC version unmatch
NMAKE : fatal error U1077: '"c:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\VC\BIN\cl.EXE"' : return code '0x2'
Stop.

At this point I do a little digging and find this post on RubyForge about building ruby-debug from scratch on Windows.  I’m no C++ guru, but the last comment by Fred Seltzer says:

Hmmm. I just hacked up my copy of config.h to no longer
require the specific version of the C compiler and it built
and ran just fine. I don’t want to go back and revisit
this. Let’s call it closed…

Fredonrails…

Aha!  The light bulb in my head turns on and I decide to go check out this nefarious “config.h” sitting in my Ruby installation (you can see the full path in the error message above).  When I open the config.h, I see the first 3 lines look something like this:

#if _MSC_VER != 1200
#error MSC version unmatch
#endif

After I removed these 3 lines, I tried the command again, and alas, ruby-debug-ide installed!

I hope this helps other folks out there to get ruby-debug-ide installed.  I know it’s sort of a pain in the rear, but it worked for me.  I’m pretty sure this will work with Visual C++ 2008 Express, also, but I don’t have it installed so I couldn’t confirm for sure.  If you don’t mind chewing up a little hard drive space, this method will save you some time in the long run.  Happy coding!

So earlier this year I wrote a post about how I wanted to learn Ruby on Rails.  For a while now, I’ve put that project on the back burner.  I decided after my last post on the subject that ASP.NET MVC was more fitting for me because, let’s face it, I’m a .NET developer right?  And aren’t .NET developers supposed to stick with .NET stuff?  After deploying my first site using ASP.NET MVC, I came away with a feeling that it was a little heavier than I’d like it to be, and I really don’t like paying for another separate Windows VPS just to host one website!  There’s also the fact that Linux is way more efficient in limited resource deployments (like VPS’s).  All of this boils down to the fact that Rails called to me once again, and I decided that if I was going to do Rails development, I needed to figure out the deployment environment.

After doing some research, Ruby Enterprise Edition and Phusion Passenger seemed like the obvious choice for production Rails deployment.  Both products value resource management in environments just like mine, and the numbers they claim to achieve were very impressive!  If you want to run Phusion Passenger, however, your choices in a web server are limited to Apache or Nginx.  Considering my previous encounters with Apache, I decided Nginx was the way to go.  That said, after hours of fussing getting this environment set up properly, I decided that it would be best if I contributed a guide to the community.  This wasn’t the easiest process in the world, and I hope this tutorial can help someone else avoid the headaches that I faced.

Step 1: Environment and pre-requisites

First and foremost, I use a 32-bit version of Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala on my VPS.  the instructions you see are specific to my environment, but I’m sure they could be adapted for use in others.  On my server, there were some packages that were necessary pre-requisites.  Here are the steps to install them:

First, edit your /etc/apt/sources.list and remove the comment marks (#) in front of the universe repository lines

deb http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ karmic universe
deb-src http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ karmic universe
deb http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ karmic-updates universe
deb-src http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ karmic-updates universe
deb http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu karmic-security universe
deb-src http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu karmic-security universe

Next you need to issue the following commands to get all the rest of the packages you need:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install build-essential libxml2-dev libssl-dev libbz2-dev curl libcurl4-openssl-dev libpng12-dev libmcrypt-dev mysql-server libmysqlclient-dev libxslt1-dev autoconf2.13 libltdl-dev libreadline5-dev libsqlite3-ruby postgresql-server-dev-8.4 libpcre3-dev

Next you need to install libevent. There is a version of this in the repository, but it’s pretty out of date, and PHP-FPM prefers the newer version. For this requirement, I decided to compile from source. Use the following commands to get this installed.

wget http://monkey.org/~provos/libevent-1.4.13-stable.tar.gz
cd libevent-1.4.13-stable
./configure
make && sudo make install

Step 2: Compiling PHP  from source with Suhosin and PHP-FPM

So the reason I decided to compile PHP from source is because it’s the easiest way (for me) to apply the PHP-FPM patch and make sure I have everything I need.  I realize that there may be some Ubuntu packages out there at some point, but there weren’t any that were easily found when I performed these steps.  That said, our first step is to snag the PHP source and then apply the Suhosin patch.

wget http://us2.php.net/get/php-5.3.1.tar.bz2/from/this/mirror
bzip2 -dc php-5.3.1.tar.bz2 | tar xf -
wget http://download.suhosin.org/suhosin-patch-5.3.1-0.9.8.patch.gz
gunzip suhosin-patch-5.3.1-0.9.8.patch.gz
patch -d php-5.3.1 -p1 < suhosin-patch-5.3.1-0.9.8.patch

Now we have to install the PHP-FPM patch. In order to do this, we actually need a legacy version of autoconf and autoheader, because the PHP buildconf script relies on them. Luckily, they were installed earlier when we grabbed stuff from the Ubuntu repositories. All we have to do is set some environment variables to force the legacy versions to be used. Then we can just apply the patch and compile PHP.

export PHP_AUTOCONF=/usr/bin/autoconf2.13
export PHP_AUTOHEADER=/usr/bin/autoheader2.13
wget http://launchpad.net/php-fpm/master/0.6/+download/php-fpm-0.6~5.3.1.tar.gz
tar -zxf php-fpm-0.6~5.3.1.tar.gz
php-fpm-0.6-5.3.1/generate-fpm-patch
patch -d php-5.3.1 -p1 < fpm.patch
cd php-5.3.1
./buildconf --force
./configure --enable-bcmath --with-bz2 --enable-calendar --with-fpm --with-libevent=shared --with-curl --enable-dba --enable-exif --enable-ftp --with-gd --with-gettext --enable-mbstring --with-mysql --with-mysqli --with-pdo-mysql --with-openssl --with-pcre-regex --enable-shmop --enable-soap --enable-sockets --enable-sysvmsg --enable-wddx --enable-zip --with-zlib --enable-sysvsem --enable-sysvshm --with-mcrypt --enable-pcntl --enable-mbregex --with-mhash --with-xsl
sudo make all install

Step 3: Compiling Ruby Enterprise Edition and Nginx

Now that PHP-FPM is installed, we need to get Nginx up and running.  The good part is that Ruby Enterprise Edition comes bundled with Phusion Passenger which will handle compiling Nginx for us.  We do, however, need to download the Nginx source manually because there are some options that we’d like to pass to the Nginx configure script.

cd ..
wget http://sysoev.ru/nginx/nginx-0.7.64.tar.gz
tar -zxf nginx-0.7.64.tar.gz
wget http://rubyforge.org/frs/download.php/66162/ruby-enterprise-1.8.7-2009.10.tar.gz
tar -zxf ruby-enterprise-1.8.7-2009.10.tar.gz
sudo ruby-enterprise-1.8.7-2009.10/installer

The cool part about Ruby Enterprise Edition is that it’s completely isolated from the rest of your system, and it installs most of the default gems for you.  As a matter of fact, the only thing left to do is to actually install Nginx with Phusion Passenger support, and that’s exactly what we’re doing next!

sudo /opt/ruby-enterprise-1.8.7-2009.10/bin/passenger-install-nginx-module

While running through this installer, there are a series of prompts.  Be sure you answer the following:

Enter your choice (1 or 2) or press Ctrl-C to abort: 2
Please specify the directory: <enter your directory, in my case it was /home/scott/nginx-0.7.64>
Please specify a prefix directory [/opt/nginx]: /usr/local/nginx
Extra arguments to pass to configure script: --sbin-path=/usr/local/sbin --with-http_ssl_module --without-mail_pop3_module --without-mail_imap_module --without-mail_smtp_module --with-http_stub_status_module --with-http_gzip_static_module

Step 4: Configuration of PHP-FPM and Nginx

Sweet! At this point you should have a shiny new Nginx install. Before we can start it up, though, there are a few configuration files we have to mess with. First we need to configure PHP-FPM to run as the proper user and place a default php.ini file in the appropriate directory.  First, let’s edit php-fpm.conf.  There are 4 lines we need to change, so just search through the file and make sure they look like this:

<value name="owner">www-data</value>
<value name="group">www-data</value>
<value name="user">www-data</value>
<value name="group">www-data</value>

Next we need to copy in the default php.ini file from the source directory.

sudo cp php-5.3.1/php.ini-production /usr/local/etc/php.ini

Finally, we need to configure Nginx.  I don’t like having one huge configuration file, so I really like to split things up.  You can edit this to your liking, but here’s basically how I set my default config (found at /usr/local/nginx/conf/nginx.conf):

user  www-data;
worker_processes  6;

events {
 worker_connections  1024;
}

http {
 include       mime.types;
 default_type  application/octet-stream;
 sendfile        on;
 keepalive_timeout  10 10;

 passenger_root /opt/ruby-enterprise-1.8.7-2009.10/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/passenger-2.2.7;
 passenger_ruby /opt/ruby-enterprise-1.8.7-2009.10/bin/ruby;

 gzip  on;
 gzip_comp_level 1;
 gzip_proxied any;
 gzip_types text/plain text/css application/x-javascript text/xml application/xml application/xml+rss text/javascript;

 log_format main '$remote_addr - $remote_user [$time_local] '
 '"$request" $status  $body_bytes_sent "$http_referer" '
 '"$http_user_agent" "$http_x_forwarded_for"';

 access_log  /var/log/nginx_access.log main;

 error_log  /var/log/nginx_error.log crit;

 include /usr/local/nginx/sites-enabled/*;
}

Now we need to set some default fastcgi options in /usr/local/nginx/conf/fastgci_params.  I just appended these to the end of the file.

fastcgi_connect_timeout 60;
fastcgi_send_timeout 180;
fastcgi_read_timeout 180;
fastcgi_buffer_size 128k;
fastcgi_buffers 4 256k;
fastcgi_busy_buffers_size 256k;
fastcgi_temp_file_write_size 256k;
fastcgi_intercept_errors on;

Next, I like to create a “/usr/local/nginx/sites-enabled” directory that houses each website’s configuration details.  First I’ll show the configuration I used to handle URL rewrites for Wordpress (this blog).  I called the file /usr/local/nginx/sites-enabled/geeksharp.com.

server {
 listen 80;
 server_name *.geeksharp.com *.geeksharp.info *.geeksharp.org geeksharp.info geeksharp.org;
 rewrite ^(.*) http://geeksharp.com$1 permanent;
}

server {
 listen 80;
 server_name geeksharp.com;
 location / {
 root   /var/www;  # absolute path to your WordPress installation
 index  index.php index.html index.htm;

 # this serves static files that exist without running other rewrite tests
 if (-f $request_filename) {
 expires 30d;
 break;
 }

 # this sends all non-existing file or directory requests to index.php
 if (!-e $request_filename) {
 rewrite ^(.+)$ /index.php?q=$1 last;
 }
 }

 location ~ \.php$ {
 fastcgi_pass 127.0.0.1:9000;
 fastcgi_index index.php;
 fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME /var/www$fastcgi_script_name;
 include fastcgi_params;
 }
}

Here’s how I’d set up a rails site.  In this example, the file is called /usr/local/nginx/sites-enabled/geeksharp.net.

server {
 listen 80;
 server_name *.geeksharp.net;
 rewrite ^(.*) http://geeksharp.net$1 permanent;
}

server {
 listen 80;
 server_name geeksharp.net;
 root /home/scott/geeksharp.net/public;
 passenger_enabled on;
 access_log /home/scott/geeksharp.net-access.log;
 error_log /home/scott/geeksharp.net-error.log;
}

Step 5: Startup scripts

Finally, I like to ensure that all my stuff comes up when the system reboots, so here’s a neato Nginx init.d script that I found.  Place this file at /etc/init.d/nginx, and make sure you give it execute permissions (chmod +x!)

#! /bin/sh

### BEGIN INIT INFO
# Provides:          nginx
# Required-Start:    $all
# Required-Stop:     $all
# Default-Start:     2 3 4 5
# Default-Stop:      0 1 6
# Short-Description: starts the nginx web server
# Description:       starts nginx using start-stop-daemon
### END INIT INFO

PATH=/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin
DAEMON=/usr/local/sbin/nginx
NAME=nginx
DESC=nginx

test -x $DAEMON || exit 0

# Include nginx defaults if available
if [ -f /etc/default/nginx ] ; then
 . /etc/default/nginx
fi

set -e

case "$1" in
 start)
 echo -n "Starting $DESC: "
 start-stop-daemon --start --quiet --pidfile /usr/local/nginx/logs/$NAME.pid \
 --exec $DAEMON -- $DAEMON_OPTS
 echo "$NAME."
 ;;
 stop)
 echo -n "Stopping $DESC: "
 start-stop-daemon --stop --quiet --pidfile /usr/local/nginx/logs/$NAME.pid \
 --exec $DAEMON
 echo "$NAME."
 ;;
 restart|force-reload)
 echo -n "Restarting $DESC: "
 start-stop-daemon --stop --quiet --pidfile \
 /usr/local/nginx/logs/$NAME.pid --exec $DAEMON
 sleep 1
 start-stop-daemon --start --quiet --pidfile \
 /usr/local/nginx/logs/$NAME.pid --exec $DAEMON -- $DAEMON_OPTS
 echo "$NAME."
 ;;
 reload)
 echo -n "Reloading $DESC configuration: "
 start-stop-daemon --stop --signal HUP --quiet --pidfile /usr/local/nginx/logs/$NAME.pid \
 --exec $DAEMON
 echo "$NAME."
 ;;
 *)
 N=/etc/init.d/$NAME
 echo "Usage: $N {start|stop|restart|force-reload}" >&2
 exit 1
 ;;
esac

exit 0

Finally, make sure you update your rc.d

sudo update-rc.d nginx defaults
sudo update-rc.d php-fpm defaults

Please note that if for some reason nginx won’t start, chances are you have a config issue.  When you issue a restart command, the config errors usually will not be displayed.  The best way to track them down is to is to simply issue a stop command followed by a start command, and your errors will be displayed.  If you ever need to restart your services manually, you can use these commands (I find that restart can be buggy, which is why I explicity stop and start each one):

sudo /etc/init.d/php-fpm stop && sudo /etc/init.d/php-fpm start
sudo /etc/init.d/nginx stop && sudo /etc/init.d/nginx start

So that’s it! I know this is an epic post, but I hope it helps someone. Leave comments if you have specific questions or if I left out something particularly useful. Again, I understand that there’s probably a better way to do something, so feel free to share your thoughts!  As a final thought, I would like to thank Joshua Dorkin for providing a great article on which I based a lot of this material!

Earlier this year I attended MIX09, and one of the key takeaways was the Microsoft Web Platform Installer.  Microsoft has realized that for the “average Joe,” setting up a new Windows-based web server with all the necessary configurations and supporting frameworks can be rather cumbersome.  This is even more obvious when you begin to work with IIS7, given the fact that the administration system has changed drastically.  The idea behind this specialized installer is to perform all of the work for you.  Sounds neat, huh?  Well after screwing around with my VPS for hours, I can tell you that things aren’t exactly as easy as they seem.  To make a very long story quite a bit shorter, I’ve found through my troubles that things need to be installed in a very specific order:

1. Grab the Web Platform Installer.
2. Open the “Web Platform” tab and ensure that you only install components from the “Web Server” and “Frameworks and Runtimes” sections.  You might be tempted to add in SQL Server 2008 Express, but don’t.  Trust me when I tell you this.
3. Once everything is finished (which will take forever), now you can attempt to install the SQL Server 2008 Express SP1 package, but don’t bother with the Express Management Studio because it will fail no matter what.  If you must have this package, I recommend purchasing a license for Microsoft SQL Server Developer edition and installing only the client tools on the VPS.  No matter which way I tried, I could never get the Express Management Studio to install properly.
4. Pray to the Microsoft gods that everything goes without a hitch.
5. If you’re lucky, you have a working Windows-based web server.

Good luck to the brave souls that wish to venture into this territory.  I had nothing but issues with it and I wonder if I wouldn’t have been more successful if I’d have just done it manually from the start.  Perhaps these issues are just because of the VPS environment that I’m installing in, but I can’t be the only one out there that uses a virtual server for their web deployments!

Over the next few weeks I plan on spending a lot more time with Rails and ASP.NET MVC.  My end goal is to present an overview of the benefits and faults of each technology, and hopefully I can provide a somewhat objective point of view for people new to MVC.  Stay tuned!

Given that I have a MySQL database laying around, I decided to poke around in the source code to see exactly how MySQL’s PASSWORD() function really works.  It didn’t take me long to find inside the file “libmysql/password.c” this little gem:

/*
    MySQL 4.1.1 password hashing: SHA conversion (see RFC 2289, 3174) twice
    applied to the password string, and then produced octet sequence is
    converted to hex string.
    The result of this function is used as return value from PASSWORD() and
    is stored in the database.
  SYNOPSIS
    make_scrambled_password()
    buf       OUT buffer of size 2*SHA1_HASH_SIZE + 2 to store hex string
    password  IN  NULL-terminated password string
*/

void
make_scrambled_password(char *to, const char *password)
{
  SHA1_CONTEXT sha1_context;
  uint8 hash_stage2[SHA1_HASH_SIZE];

  mysql_sha1_reset(&sha1_context);
  /* stage 1: hash password */
  mysql_sha1_input(&sha1_context, (uint8 *) password, (uint) strlen(password));
  mysql_sha1_result(&sha1_context, (uint8 *) to);
  /* stage 2: hash stage1 output */
  mysql_sha1_reset(&sha1_context);
  mysql_sha1_input(&sha1_context, (uint8 *) to, SHA1_HASH_SIZE);
  /* separate buffer is used to pass 'to' in octet2hex */
  mysql_sha1_result(&sha1_context, hash_stage2);
  /* convert hash_stage2 to hex string */
  *to++= PVERSION41_CHAR;
  octet2hex(to, (const char*) hash_stage2, SHA1_HASH_SIZE);
}

As you can see, the password algorithm uses a double-SHA1 hash to format the password.  The other little tidbit is that any passwords generated post-4.1 will be pre-pended with an asterisk (*).  Given that I have spent a fair amount of time recently working with cryptography in .NET, it didn’t take long to adapt this code to C#.  The following function produces the same output as the MySQL PASSWORD() function.

public string GeneralteMySQLHash(string key)
{
    byte[] keyArray = Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(key);
    SHA1Managed enc = new SHA1Managed();
    byte[] encodedKey = enc.ComputeHash(enc.ComputeHash(keyArray));
    StringBuilder myBuilder = new StringBuilder(encodedKey.Length);

    foreach (byte b in encodedKey)
        myBuilder.Append(b.ToString("X"));

    return "*" + myBuilder.ToString();
}

I hope this helps someone out there. I know it was kinda of fun to put on my super-slueth hat for a while .

Update 5/29/2009: I found a neat way to do this in T-SQL also. It’s a bit ugly, but it works!

SELECT '*' + SUBSTRING(master.dbo.fn_varbintohexstr(HASHBYTES('SHA1',HASHBYTES('SHA1','VALUE-TO-ENCRYPT-GOES-HERE'))),1,42)

When I logged into my VPS, one of the things I wanted to install right away was SQL Server 2008.  In order for SQL Server 2008 to install, you must first have installed the Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 SP1.  I figured it was no big deal and decided to let SQL handle my install.  Once the installer got going, it immediately halted and displayed an error message telling me it couldn’t be installed.  After checking the log file, I found the following:

WapUI: [2] DepCheck indicates Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0SP1 (x64) (CBS) is not installed.

Obviously on Windows Server 2008 SP1, the .NET Framework 2.0SP1 is already installed by default.  Just to prove it to myself, I downloaded and ran the installer.  Sure enough, it failed before it even started, telling me that it could not be installed on Windows Vista.  So I began to poke around the VPS.  One of the things that jumped out at me was the fact that the Windows Update service was disabled.  When I checked with my VPS provider’s documentation, they indicated that Windows updates must be disabled because they are slipstreamed into the OS build.  Updating your VPS through Windows Update can (and probably will) break it.  Yikes!

After a bit more searching, I found a solution to the problem.  It turns out that the .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 installer requires the Windows Update service to be running, but you can still set your server to “Never check for updates.”  By temporarily enabling the Windows Update service, I was able to install .NET 3.5 SP1 without a hitch.  I hope this helps anyone else using a VPS, because it sure gave me a little bit of a headache!

Notice the huge icon next to my link for my Doctor’s Office in the photo above?  This was driving me crazy, so I started looking for ways to fix it without having to switch my theme (I know it looks just like IE8, and that’s on purpose!).  After searching for solutions, I really didn’t find any other instances of folks having the same problem, so I set out to devise my own solution.  This solution works best if you have the Stylish add-on installed.

1. Install Stylish
2. Navigate to Tools > Add-ons, then find Sylish in the list and click Options.
3. Click the Write button and paste the following code:

   @namespace url(http://www.mozilla.org/keymaster/gatekeeper/there.is.only.xul);
   @-moz-document url(chrome://browser/content/browser.xul) {
     #ybToolbar-bookmarksview{
       height:0px !important;
     }
     #ybToolbar .toolbarbutton-icon{
       height:16px !important;
       width:16px!important;
     }
     #ybToolbar-chevron .toolbarbutton-icon{
       height: 5px !important;
       width: 7px !important;
     }
   }

4. Save your script and enjoy your fixed delicious toolbar!

Good luck, and happy hacking!