Question

Ruby on Rails One Click install - Change/add application and keep Puma running

Posted October 18, 2018 3.9k views
Ruby on RailsUbuntu 18.04

Good day,

I’ve use the one click Ruby on Rails image to create a droplet. I’ve cloned my project in /home/rails/project-name and installed all dependancies and migrated the database. I’ve also created a virtual host configuration file in sites-available and added a symbolic link to sites enabled.

I’ve edited /etc/systemd/system/rails.service to changed the path. I’ve reloaded/refreshed the unit file and restarted the rails service and rebooted the server.

The problem I have is that my application won’t work unless I start puma manually (if I don’t nginx shows a 502 error).

If I start the puma server manually everything works fine but it shuts down as soon as I exit the terminal.

Please can someone help me figure out what the issue might be? This happens when both I listen on port 3000 and using a unix socket. It even happens for a fresh rails installation. The only difference in my app and the example app is that I use MySql instead of Postgres…

Any ideas?

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designcafe
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5 answers
paccha February 3, 2019

Try seeing the output of

tail -f /var/log/syslog

Take a look if it shows: “ Environment: development”… somewhere in the Puma output.

I was able to add any Environment Variable I needed in the file:
/etc/systemd/system/rails.service
using the format

[Service]
Type=simple
Environment="One=1" "Three=3"
Environment="Two=2"
Environment="Four=4"

I achieved removal the 5XX Server Error after affected services were restarted and systemctl daemon-reload used. So add-to-that:
systemctl restart nginx
systemctl restart rails
(…if not a full reboot).

In actuality, mine config turned out to be more like:

Environment="RAILS_ENV=production"
Environment="RAILS_MASTER_KEY=blah1234" #This is a Rails >v5.2 feature
Environment="RAILS_DATABASE_PASSWORD=12341234etc..."

Some more thoughts:
A point of consumption for me is confusing ENV Vars, particularly if whether they are being set, or benignly stored in /root/.passwords.digitalocean.or.something

The /root/.dot-file location seems to indeed be benign, (but also a good place to copy the above-needed environment variables from.)

I will research if there is a more appropriate place for these environment settings I describe in this post. So, if you have info, please share.

referenced:
https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/455261/how-to-set-environmental-variable-in-systemd-service

https://www.digitalocean.com/docs/one-clicks/ruby-on-rails/

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  • designcafe July 12, 2019

    Thanks, @paccha!

    Busy writing another app now and I managed to get it working by setting Environment="RAILS_ENV=production" in /etc/systemd/system/rails.service.

    Now my assets can’t be found in production so I’ve added the following to my `config/environments/production.rb file:

    config.assets.compile = true
config.assets.digest = true

    This allows the app to fallback to the asset pipeline if a precompiled asset is missed (I think). Then I need to restart nginx and the rails systemd service as root. Still trying to see what is the best way to get Capistrano to restart these…

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lkartono October 29, 2018

Hi,

I’m facing the same issue with my server (same config as yours). While I haven’t found any solutions yet, I noticed that their original setup does not work either. When you create a new droplet and try accessing the url (droplet’s IP), it shows a NGINX page, not at all a Rails page. Also, if you take a look at their /home/rails/example app, it’s just an empty shell, there’s not even a view to be render. With Puma, NGINX should normally implement an upstream which is not present in /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/rails.

Is there a member of Digitalocean team that could help us understand this ? What’s the point of a one-click app if the setup is not working properly ? Not blaming you guys (you are doing an amazing work), just trying to understand.

I’ll keep you posted if I found any clues, will try to set this up as if the server was a fresh install without Rails/Ruby/Puma.

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janskapa November 16, 2018

I’ve ran into the same roadblock. I get 502 bad gateway and I can’t seem to get Puma to serve the app (even if I run it from the terminal and keep it running there). Any luck anyone, or @digitalocean ?

Thank you,

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brynn96a6cb094e5dc375f2c05 October 30, 2018

I have the same problem. Please, @digitalocean give us a solution.

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asanaathleisure2019 January 20, 2019

Hell, did anyone find a solution this problem?

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