Deploy multiple Rails app to the same Linux (Ubuntu) server using nginx, Puma and Capistrano.
Stop paying hundreds of dollars to AWS, Heroku and similar services! Host multiple Rails apps in a single VPS Ubuntu server with a single command.
β οΈ WARNING: This is a prototype β I created it to deploy my own Rails projects. It may NOT be production ready.
You need an already working Rails app, ready to deploy, and using the same Ruby version as your server. Also, you need to be using a postgresql
db and adapter.
π‘ You can just run this script I created to set up a new Ubuntu Server 22.04 LTS machine and get it ready to accept Rails apps via Capistrano. You may need to run something like this afterwards: post-setup script
I really really recommend you use the script I provided above. If you'd rather set up your own server manually: you need a target production Linux server you can ssh
into, with a user with nopasswd
sudo access, and with the following stuff installed: ruby
, rvm
, bundler
, certbot
, nginx
, psql
, git
(the recommended option is to spin up a that has all this already installed). If you're using private Git repos, make sure your server has access to those via ssh (how-to in the following setup instructions).
Minimum server requirements: 2vCPUs, 4GB RAM. Modern Rails apps might crash with fewer resources, even if small.
If you're using a private GitHub repo, make your server talk with your Git server via ssh
:
- Create a ssh key on your Linux server using the email you use to log in to GitHub.
ssh-keygen -t rsa -b 4096 -C "[email protected]"
- Make sure your ssh agent is running
eval "$(ssh-agent -s)"
- Add your new ssh key (assuming you didn't specify a custom key name, so the key name is the default
id_rsa
)
ssh-add ~/.ssh/id_rsa
- Show the public key content so you can copy it (again, assuming default key name
id_rsa
):
cat ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub
- Go to GitHub.com > Settings > SSH and GPG keys > New SSH key. Add a human-readable title like "Ubuntu production server at 1.2.3.4", paste in your public key you had just copied and hit "Add SSH key"
On your local development machine clone Multirail to any location with git clone https://github.com/rameerez/multirail.git && cd multirail
Then just execute this (MAKE SURE you REPLACE your own values!):
./multirail -d yourdomain.com -i 123.123.123.123 -u rails -g [email protected]:your_github_username/your_rails_repo.git -n your_rails_app_name -f /path/to/your/local/rails/app -v 3.2.3
Where:
yourdomain.com
is the domain you wish to deploy your app to.123.123.123.123
the IP address of your server.rails
is the Linux user in your server that will be used to deploy.[email protected]:your_github_username/your_rails_repo.git
is the Git SSH URL of your repository from which Capistrano will pull the code.your_rails_app_name
is just the name of your app (best to name it equal to your repo). [β οΈ IMPORTANT: due to a bug, please don't use any non-letter characters or spaces in the name. Just letters. Or else Postgresql will fail to create the user]/path/to/your/local/rails/app
is the path on your local machine where the Rails project is.3.2.3
is the Ruby version both your project and your server are using.
For more info, execute ./multirail -h
π¨ Important
After this, you need to ssh
into your server and create your /home/rails/apps/your_rails_app_name/shared/config/master.key
file with the same contents as the dev file so the Rails secrets file can be decoded in the server.
You're done! Import your PostgreSQL data (if any) and you're ready to go! β¨ Now go to your domain and verify everything is working flawlessly and with a shiny π SSL cert!
- App names must NOT contain any non-letter characters or spaces. Name your apps "myapp" (all together, no spaces) instead of "my-app"
- The
puma
version in the Rails' project Gemfile must be kept at~> 4.0
because they got rid of the daemon mode on v5 and the newsystemctl
services don't work under our current setup, this is a big TODO for this project
- Revert unsuccessfull installations
- Completely remove an app from the server
If you're getting weird LOCALE errors, you might need to stop accepting remote locale on the server by commenting out the AcceptEnv LANG LC_*
line in the remote (server) /etc/ssh/sshd_config
file.
If your server is x86_64 (Intel / AMD), you may want to run:
bundle lock --add-platform x86_64-linux
bundle lock --add-platform ruby
If your server is ARM64, you may want to run:
bundle lock --add-platform aarch64-linux
bundle lock --add-platform ruby
In any case, make sure your server architecture (like x86_64-linux
) and ruby
are added to your local Gemfile.lock, or the deployment script will complain and interrupt in the first deployment.
If the database server is not working:
ssh
into the server and check that puma
is running
ps aux | grep puma
Then you should see at least one process that's running on an unix sock. It should be the same sock as configured in the deploy.rb
script. Example output:
rails 848 0.0 6.5 803396 66228 ? Ssl May03 9:30 puma 3.12.0 (tcp://0.0.0.0:3000) [example]
rails 4683 0.0 13.0 864652 131388 ? Sl May14 5:13 puma 3.12.1 (unix:///home/rails/apps/app1/shared/tmp/sockets/app1-puma.sock)
rails 25487 3.6 9.2 847816 93244 ? Sl 08:57 0:03 puma 3.12.0 (unix:///home/rails/apps/app2/shared/tmp/sockets/app2-puma.sock)
rails 25525 0.0 0.1 11464 1152 pts/0 S+ 08:58 0:00 grep --color=auto puma
If the required app is not running, check if it has a valid pid (or any at all). cd
to the app dir (cd ~/apps/APPNAME
) and ls
the pids
folder in search of the puma.pid
:
ls shared/tmp/pids/
If puma.pid
is not in the output, the puma server is down.
From the local dev environment, cd to the rails project and spin it up with:
bundle exec cap production deploy:restart
This should create the puma.pid
and ps aux | grep puma
should now output our process. We may also try
bundle exec cap production puma:restart
if that's not enough.
ssh
into the server- Delete the directory the Rails app was deployed to
/apps/your_rails_app_name
- Delete any related Postgres databases
sudo su - postgres psql \l DROP DATABASE <your_rails_app_name>_production;
- See what's on nginx config
ls -lah /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/
- Remove the sites that are no longer present
rm /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/your_rails_app_name
- Restart nginx
sudo service nginx restart
- See what's on Letsencrypt
sudo ls /etc/letsencrypt/live
- Remove the site from Letsencrypt
sudo rm -rf /etc/letsencrypt/live/your_rails_app_name