Apache, It Works!

I was looking through the slicehost article section the other night and bumped into an awesome article on initial configuration steps for ubuntu. If you don’t know what your doing, you should go take a look at that.

So, anyway. I’ve got a server up and going doing absolutely nothing, and I’m assuming you do too at this point. It’s just waiting for me to begin steaming on ahead with the initial production stack I’m planning on using first.

Lets get Apache on there for some instant gratification:

sudo apt-get install apache2 apache2-doc apache2-mpm-worker apache2-utils apache2.2-common libapr1 libaprutil1 libpq5 libexpat1 ssl-cert

That’s all you’ll need, the ssl-cert package is there so that people can do things over https:// with your website like logging in, buying things etc…. Provided you’ve created a port 80 hole in your firewall you should be able to go have a look at the default page once you’ve made sure apache is up and running.

sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 force-reload

Next I tried getting ruby on there but discovered that it already was, but not really. It looked like most of it’s source was, but none of the binaries were, fully weird. So I uninstalled the base ruby packages:

sudo apt-get remove ruby1.8-dev ruby1.8 ri1.8 rdoc1.8 irb1.8

Then reinstalled everything I thought I’d need:

apt-get install ruby1.8-dev ruby1.8 ri1.8 rdoc1.8 irb1.8 libreadline-ruby1.8 libruby1.8 libopenssl-ruby libopenssl-ruby1.8

Unfortunately this is Ruby 1.8.6 at patch level 111 (2007-09-24) which has some significant security issues associated with it covered last month on the rails weblog. I was surprised to find that the ubuntu packages havn’t been updated and that a quick google didn’t turn up an immediate solution for me apart from Ruby Enterprise Edition. I don’t really want to manually compile it from source and/or apply some back ported patch.

I’d read that you only gain real advantage from using this fork of ruby when it’s used in conjunction with mod_rails so I wasn’t going to bother with it. I might now though, especially as they appear to have had a quick turn around on this issue. Additionally I want to quickly move to using Rails 2.1 with Ruby 1.8.7, and again, the ubuntu package was an old build of 1.8.6.

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