Try here: http://tnux.net/miniwiki/

First I created a config file to enter my Amazon S3 credentials. The credentials are dependent on the Ruby on Rails environment.

config/amazon_s3.yml

development:
  bucket_name: BUCKET_NAME
  access_key_id: ACCESS_KEY_ID
  secret_access_key: SECRET_ACCESS_KEY

test:
  bucket_name: BUCKET_NAME
  access_key_id: ACCESS_KEY_ID
  secret_access_key: SECRET_ACCESS_KEY

production:
  bucket_name: BUCKET_NAME
  access_key_id: ACCESS_KEY_ID
  secret_access_key: SECRET_ACCESS_KEY

Created a controller and added the index method. The method reads the S3 settings from the config file and generates the fields required for SWFUpload and S3.

  def index
    filename = "#{RAILS_ROOT}/config/amazon_s3.yml"
    config = YAML.load_file(filename)

    bucket            = config[ENV['RAILS_ENV']]['bucket_name']
    access_key_id     = config[ENV['RAILS_ENV']]['access_key_id']
    secret_access_key = config[ENV['RAILS_ENV']]['secret_access_key']

    key             = ENV['RAILS_ENV']
    acl             = 'public-read'
    expiration_date = 10.hours.from_now.utc.strftime('%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S.000Z')
    max_filesize    = 2.gigabyte

    policy = Base64.encode64(
      "{'expiration': '#{expiration_date}',
        'conditions': [
          {'bucket': '#{bucket}'},
          ['starts-with', '$key', '#{key}'],
          {'acl': '#{acl}'},
          {'success_action_status': '201'},
          ['starts-with', '$Filename', ''],
          ['content-length-range', 0, #{max_filesize}]
        ]
      }").gsub(/\n|\r/, '')

    signature = Base64.encode64(
                  OpenSSL::HMAC.digest(
                    OpenSSL::Digest::Digest.new('sha1'),
                    secret_access_key, policy)).gsub("\n","")

    @post = {
      "key" => "#{key}/${filename}",
      "AWSAccessKeyId" => "#{access_key_id}",
      "acl" => "#{acl}",
      "policy" => "#{policy}",
      "signature" => "#{signature}",
      "success_action_status" => "201"
    }

    @upload_url = "http://#{bucket}.s3.amazonaws.com/"
  end

And the index.html.erb view.

<% content_for :head do %>
<link href="/stylesheets/swfupload.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" />
<% end%>

<script type="text/javascript" src="/javascripts/swfupload/swfupload.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="/javascripts/swfupload/swfupload.queue.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="/javascripts/swfupload/fileprogress.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="/javascripts/swfupload/handlers.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">
	var swfu;

	window.onload = function() {
		var settings = {
			flash_url : "/assets/swfupload.swf",
			upload_url: "<%= @upload_url %>",
			http_success : [ 200, 201, 204 ], 		// FOR AWS

			file_size_limit : "2 GB",
			file_types : "*.*",
			file_types_description : "All Files",
			file_upload_limit : 100,
			file_queue_limit : 0,
			file_post_name : "file", 				// FOR AWS

			custom_settings : {
				progressTarget : "fsUploadProgress",
				cancelButtonId : "btnCancel"
			},
			debug: <%= ENV['RAILS_ENV']=='development' ? 'true' : 'false' %>,

			// Button settings
			button_image_url : "/images/buttonUploadText.png",
			button_placeholder_id : "spanButtonPlaceHolder",
			button_width: 61,
			button_height: 22,

			// The event handler functions are defined in handlers.js
			file_queued_handler : fileQueued,
			file_queue_error_handler : fileQueueError,
			file_dialog_complete_handler : fileDialogComplete,
			upload_start_handler : uploadStart,
			upload_progress_handler : uploadProgress,
			upload_error_handler : uploadError,
			upload_success_handler : uploadSuccess,
			upload_complete_handler : uploadComplete,
			queue_complete_handler : queueComplete,	// Queue plugin event

			post_params: <%= @post.to_json %>		// FOR AWS
		};

		swfu = new SWFUpload(settings);
     };
</script>

<div id="content">
	<form id="form" action="/upload/upload" method="post" enctype="multipart/form-data">
			<div class="fieldset flash" id="fsUploadProgress">
			<span class="legend">Upload Queue</span>
			</div>
		<div id="divStatus">0 Files Uploaded</div>
			<div>
				<span id="spanButtonPlaceHolder"></span>
				<input id="btnCancel" type="button" value="Cancel All Uploads" onclick="swfu.cancelQueue();" disabled="disabled" style="margin-left: 2px; font-size: 8pt; height: 29px;" />
			</div>

	</form>
</div>

Upload the file crossdomain.xml to the root of your bucket. This is for Flash to upload to a different domain.

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<!DOCTYPE cross-domain-policy SYSTEM "http://www.macromedia.com/xml/dtds/cross-domain-policy.dtd">
<cross-domain-policy>
  <allow-access-from domain="*" secure="false" />
</cross-domain-policy>

Finally took the files from the SWFUpload simpledemo and placed them in the following directories:

• swfupload.swf in public/assets/
• fileprogress.js, handles.js, swfupload.js and swfupload.queue.js in public/javascripts/swfupload/
• buttonUploadText.png in public/images/

Now SWFUpload should be working in your Ruby on Rails application.

Callback
For my application I needed a callback to let my application know there was a file successfully uploaded to the S3 bucket. To get this functionality I added a function to the controller and modified the handlers.js file.

  def upload_done
    file = ShareFile.new

    file.name = params[:name]
    file.filestatus = params[:filestatus]
    file.filetype = params[:type]
    file.size = params[:size]
    file.s3_available = true

    file.save
  end

function uploadSuccess(file, serverData) {
	// HERE: Send a notification upload has succeeded
	new Ajax.Request('/share/upload_done?'+Object.toQueryString(file), {
		method:'get',
		asynchronous: false,
		onSuccess: function(){
			var progress = new FileProgress(file, this.customSettings.progressTarget);
			progress.setStatus("Sending meta data.");
		}
	});
	// HERE: end

	try {
		var progress = new FileProgress(file, this.customSettings.progressTarget);
		progress.setComplete();
		progress.setStatus("Complete.");
		progress.toggleCancel(false);

	} catch (ex) {
		this.debug(ex);
	}
}

When SWFUpload is done uploading it uses the javascript callback to update the status of the form and to send a notification to the Ruby on Rails application.

Good luck!

4gb seg fixup, process ruby (pid 20252), cs:ip 73:00e0a636
printk: 151939 messages suppressed.

The console is unusable, because every second a new message appears. The logfile is unusable as well, because it is very large and takes long to open in a text editor and interesting messages are difficult to find. After some google’ing I’ve found the following page with some instructions to fix it. I’ve mixed up various methods, but this is the most robust one to use. It creates a wrapper around the gcc and g++ binaries with the correct parameters.

mv /usr/bin/gcc /usr/bin/gcc.orig
mv /usr/bin/g++ /usr/bin/g++.orig
echo '#!/bin/sh' > /usr/bin/gcc
echo '#!/bin/sh' > /usr/bin/g++
echo 'exec gcc.orig -mno-tls-direct-seg-refs $@' >> /usr/bin/gcc
echo 'exec g++.orig -mno-tls-direct-seg-refs $@' >> /usr/bin/g++
chmod a+x /usr/bin/gcc
chmod a+x /usr/bin/g++

Extract the Ruby Enterprise Edition. Be careful to use a fresh extracted version to compile, because the files will not be recompiled. Compile and install Ruby Enterprise Edition as stated in the manual.

tar zxvf ruby-enterprise-1.8.7-2009.10.tar.gz
./ruby-enterprise-1.8.7-2009.10/installer

Don’t forget to reinstall passenger, and off course reinstall all the gems from the old installation.

Now you can restore gcc and g++ as this will probably break yum updates of gcc and g++.

rm -rf /usr/bin/gcc && mv /usr/bin/gcc.orig /usr/bin/gcc
rm -rf /usr/bin/g++ && mv /usr/bin/g++.orig /usr/bin/g++

Hopefully I’ve saved you guys some time

ErrorDocument 503 /system/maintenance.html

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{DOCUMENT_ROOT}/system/maintenance.html -f
RewriteCond %{SCRIPT_FILENAME} !maintenance.html
# RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/images/
# RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/robots.txt
# RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/sitemap
RewriteRule ^.*$ – [redirect=503,last]

If your maintenance page has images on it than you can enable line 6 by removing the ‘#’.

See also Chris K’s article.

  map.namespace :admin do |admin|
    admin.resources :users
  end

And you like to have a form like this:

<% form_for(@user) do |f| %>
  <%= f.error_messages %>

Change the form_for in this and you’re good to go!

<% form_for([:admin, @user]) do |f| %>
  <%= f.error_messages %>

This might save you some time.

gem update --system -B 1000000

Before version 1.2.0 I had to do on my VPS:

gem install -B 1000000 --no-rdoc --no-ri rails

But now I can do:

gem install --no-rdoc --no-ri rails

And it’s finished in a sec!

namespace :deploy do
  desc "Restarting mod_rails with restart.txt"
  task :restart, :roles => :app, :except => { :no_release => true } do
    run "touch #{current_path}/tmp/restart.txt"
  end

  desc "Stop task is a deploy.web.disable with mod_rails"
  task :stop, :roles => :app do
    deploy.web.disable
  end

  desc "Start task is a deploy.web.enable with mod_rails"
  task :start, :roles => :app do
    deploy.web.enable
  end
end

Because in passenger there is no way of stopping or starting your Rails application, I’ve changed the deploy:start and deploy:stop to deploy:web:enable and deploy:web:disable. The deploy:restart is used by the deploy task, so now your deployment works as expected.

Update:
Don’t forget to add the rewrite rules to your apache virtual host config, otherwise the enable disable tasks won’t work.

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{DOCUMENT_ROOT}/system/maintenance.html -f
RewriteCond %{SCRIPT_FILENAME} !maintenance.html
RewriteRule ^.*$ /system/maintenance.html [L]

Passenger

Just follow the steps described on the Passenger website. Run as root:

gem install passenger

The following command verifies if all the dependencies are installed, if not it suggests what rpm’s should be installed and exits. If all the dependencies are met, it compiles the Apache 2 module and installs the module.

passenger-install-apache2-module

Personally I hate installers who do a lot of stuff you can’t control, but this one does only the stuff it should do and will not break your current setup. After the module is installed you need to add the module to Apache. So I created the file /etc/httpd/conf.d/passenger.conf with the following contents:

LoadModule passenger_module /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/passenger-2.0.1/ext/apache2/mod_passenger.so
PassengerRoot /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/passenger-2.0.1
PassengerRuby /usr/bin/ruby

Restart Apache.

/etc/init.d/httpd restart

At this point you have installed Passenger and the only thing to make a Ruby on Rails application work, is to point the Apache DocumentRoot directive to the public directory of your Rails application.

RubyEnterpriseEdition

Download RubyEnterpriseEdition (REE), extract the file and run the installer. As described on the REE website.

wget http://rubyforge.org/frs/download.php/38777/ruby-enterprise-1.8.6-20080624.tar.gz
tar xzvf ruby-enterprise-1.8.6-20080624.tar.gz
./ruby-enterprise-1.8.6-20080624/install

This installer will install it’s own Ruby environment to /opt. This is good, because it will not touch your current Ruby environment. After the installation you’ll have a separate gem installed which is version 1.2.0. The version without the gem bulkupdate, which causes a lot of memory problems on VPS’es. The following commands I’ve used to install different gems. Mysql did not install easily, but with the -- --with-mysql it worked. Note the --no-rdoc and --no-ri because we’re on a production environment we don’t need the documentation.

/opt/ruby-enterprise-1.8.6-20080624/bin/gem install --no-rdoc --no-ri rails
/opt/ruby-enterprise-1.8.6-20080624/bin/gem install --no-rdoc --no-ri -v 1.2.6 rails
/opt/ruby-enterprise-1.8.6-20080624/bin/gem install --no-rdoc --no-ri -v 2.0.2 rails
/opt/ruby-enterprise-1.8.6-20080624/bin/gem install --no-rdoc --no-ri mysql -- --with-mysql-config

If you have all the gems installed which you need in your Rails applications, it’s time to switch the Ruby Interpreter to the REE installation, we do this by replacing the PassengerRuby line in the /etc/httpd/conf.d/passenger.conf file.

PassengerRuby /opt/ruby-enterprise-1.8.6-20080624/bin/ruby

Finetuning

Depending on the available RAM on your VPS, you should add the following line to passenger.conf:

PassengerMaxPoolSize 2

To prevent Passenger from invoking to many instances of the Rails app.

Plesk

The only thing you have to do in Plesk is to modify the DocumentRoot. I’ve made a app directory where I deploy my Rails application with Capistrano. Create the file vhost.conf in the config directory of your domain.

DocumentRoot /var/www/vhosts/DOMAIN.COM/app/current/public

After that run the following command to let Plesk reconfigure your domain and add a include for your vhost.conf file.

/usr/local/psa/admin/sbin/websrvmng -u --vhost-name=DOMAIN.COM