Radiant Configuration using Apache/Mongrel/MySql

Ruby Apps Radiant CMS
1

Hi All,

I’m reconfiguring my Ubuntu-based Slice for a new Radiant server
featuring
Apache2, Mongrel, MySql. After some extensive searching there is little
if
any information on deploying a server with that particular mix.

Also read that excellent 96 page Radiant.pdf but had some questions;

1). Is it preferable to use Sqlite3 or MySql on a small business, medium
traffic website with Radiant as the frontend?
2). If I install Radiant 0.6.0RC2 which includes Rails 1.2.2, can I
upgrade
to Rails 1.2.3 with confidence in Radiant remaining fairly stable?
3). Has anyone successfully deployed Radiant using Capistrano/Deprec?

With regard to point 3)., I had a try at this today and it failed after
the
unpack, due to the local system (my desktop) not having a current DB
installed & configured. Can this default DB-connection be over-ridden?

Great application, looking forward to using it more.

Cheers, Ben.

2

Ben,

  1. I would say MySQL, but with the page caching mechanism, sqlite3 might
    be ok.
  2. The mental branch is already on 1.2.3. If you definitely need
    1.2.3, use that.
  3. It should be pretty simple to set up Radiant with Cap/Deprec, it’s
    just that you won’t have to login to the SVN server. You’ll want to
    create some extra tasks to run rake db:bootstrap and possibly copy
    over any local assets you need. In some ways cap/deprec is kind of
    overkill for Radiant since its distribution packaging is designed to
    be used in shared hosting environments. Nevertheless, it would be
    good to have some deployment recipes for Radiant.

Sean

3

Hi Sean,

Thanks for the emails. Will be good to see some quality stuff on YouTube
for
once!

I noticed on your blog, that you are using Litespeed for your RadiantCMS
site. Which version Litespeed? I was using LSWS-3.0RC2 last week, then
hopped back to Apache then to deprec/cap … so I am being a
mad-configer at
the moment.

I just ran radiant-0.6.0RC2 as per the instructions on the weblog;

  • download,
  • install, and
  • unpack … got exactly the same errors as Walter D. did previously
    (23
    march i think). Also the unpack required Rake, which I thought would
    have
    been included by default. Quick gem install rake fixed that.

cheers Ben.

4

We used Litespeed for KCKCC, yes. The admin interface was nice and
the performance is pretty decent although I don’t know how it compares
to Apache2.2/Mongrel. Some of the nice aspects of using LSAPI are
automatic management of processes, and the direct connection to the
webserver without the overhead of FCGI. Again, though, Radiant is to
“blame” for some of the good performance – the 5-minute page cache is
a good balance of dynamism and performance.

Also, if you have legacy PHP apps, LSAPI is smokin’.

Sean

5

[mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of
Benjamin M.
Sent: Thursday, March 29, 2007 10:48 PM

1). Is it preferable to use Sqlite3 or MySql on a small
business, medium traffic website with Radiant as the frontend?

For a business, I would not use SQLite. Performance is better (maybe not
even measurably in your case), but it’s a much more robust way to store
business data.

Chris

6

On Mar 30, 2007, at 12:23 AM, Benjamin M. wrote:

  • unpack … got exactly the same errors as Walter D. did
    previously (23 march i think). Also the unpack required Rake, which I
    thought would have been included by default. Quick gem install rake
    fixed that.

Glad to hear some confirmation. I was doing this on my Mac/localhost,
and was wondering if the issues I saw were mine alone. After I
unpacked, nothing at all would work – multiple permissions errors –
so I switched to svn/Mental for my exploratory hacking. Which works
fine, and I imagine I will be working from source until I wrap my head
around how to use a gem.

Walter

7

On 3/30/07, Walter Lee D. [email protected] wrote:

so I switched to svn/Mental for my exploratory hacking. Which works
fine, and I imagine I will be working from source until I wrap my head
around how to use a gem.

One thing to speed Radiant up rendering is installing erubis (as a gem
for example) and add the following line to
“config/environment/production .rb”:

require “erubis”

Speedup was very visible.

8

Thanks! Will file this away for future use. My problem was more basic,
as I could not figure out how to extend the regular Radiant features
(add tags and extensions and whatnot) when it was installed as a Gem.
First I crawl, then I figure out how to run faster…

Walter