Starting ruby on rails with multiple applications

[casper_the_ghost]

Hi,

I’m using Fedora Core 5 Linux with the latest version of Ruby on
Rails. I’m just learning it, but let’s say I’ve created two rails
applications in the directories

application1/
application2/

I can “cd” to application1 and run “ruby script/server” to start that
application. But then must I do this for “application2” as well? Is
there a generic way of starting all ruby-on-rails applications at
once?

Thanks, - Dave

[casper_the_ghost]

I had a need of something like that once, so I came up with this scheme:

In each rails folder, I create three files:
app_start
app_stop
app_restart

app_start and app_stop contain the shell script calls necessary to
start the particular application. So if you are using Mongrel,
app_start might look something like

mongrel_rails start -p 3010 -e production -d

and app_stop would look like

mongrel_rails stop

That way each app_start/stop pair is specific to the application, but
general enough to be called via a universal script. Then I created
the universal script that would descend into the directory where all
the rails apps were (/var/www in this case), and if there was an
app_start, exec it. I named the script rails_ctrl and it looks like
this:

#! /usr/bin/ruby

This script is used to launch all rails apps after a restart. It

assumes that each

app will have a file named app_start in the project’s root

directory. This file needs

to call mongrel_rails or mongrel_cluster with the proper parameters.

action = ARGV.at(0)
action ||= ‘’
action = action.downcase

app = ARGV.at(1)

if ![‘start’, ‘stop’, ‘restart’].include?(action)
puts “rails_ctrl: Invalid action: #{action}”
exit
end

root_dir = ‘/var/www/’
dirs = Dir.entries(root_dir)
dirs.each do |dir|
if ![’.’, ‘…’].include?(dir) && dir == (app || dir)
d = “#{root_dir}#{dir}”
if File.directory?(d)
f = “#{d}/app_#{action}”
if File.file?(f)
Dir.chdir(d)
puts “Performing #{action} action on #{dir}…”
system(f)
end
end
end
end

This was just hacked together one day to suit my purposes, so it may
have some holes in it. Feel free to take it and modify to fit your
environment.

Peace,
Phillip

[casper_the_ghost]

[email protected] wrote:

Hi,

I’m using Fedora Core 5 Linux with the latest version of Ruby on
Rails. I’m just learning it, but let’s say I’ve created two rails
applications in the directories

application1/
application2/

I can “cd” to application1 and run “ruby script/server” to start that
application. But then must I do this for “application2” as well?

Sure.

Is there a generic way of starting all ruby-on-rails applications at
once?

Rails applications don’t necessarily need to be “started”. Your
webserver can have virtual hosts set up so that app1.yourdomain.net and
app2.yourdomain.net point to the Rails applications under application1
and application2.

Then your webserver will take care of running those Rails applications
as requests come in to app1.yourdomain.net or app2.yourdomain.net

Look up “lighttpd virtual hosts” or “apache virtual hosts” on Google.

Stephan