Hey Folks,

I just wanted to post a quick topic here for anyone having trouble getting started with our Ruby on Rails Beta. If you haven't signed up yet and you're interested, check out our page at http://www.hostmysite.com/rails for more info.

Besides the tutorial info, there are a few things to note about the way that we specifically run Rails on our server. The biggest change if you are following one of the tutorials - particularly from either the O'Reilly Rough Cuts edition of their upcoming "Ruby on Rails: Up and Running" publication or the OnLamp tutorial here - is that they assume you are developing on a local machine with no Web server, and will have you start Ruby's built in WEBrick server from your application's path. This is great on your local machine for running a Dev version, but on our server your setup will be a bit different.

Log in to your Ruby account via SSH

From your account's root, you'll see the htdocs folders among others. HMS veterans will know that this is where you will put all of your web documents. Resist the urge to create your application in the htdocs folder! Doing so will give you a long URL to your actual web files, but could also put your configuration information live on the web. This is a Bad Thing (TM).

Instead, run the application generator in your root, or create an applications diretory if you prefer.



Now how are you going to see your docs online if they aren't in the htdocs folder? Options +FollowSymLinks, my friends. It's enabled on the Rails server. Create a symbolic link in your htdocs folder to the public directory in your testApp. use PWD if you don't know what your path is to the root directory of your account.



Now view your site at domain.com/testApp and you should see the Ruby on Rails welcome page. You should now be ready to follow the instructions from whichever tutorial you're reading.

If you're only going to run one application on the account, or at least that's all for now, you can safely either delete or rename the htdocs directory and then make your symlink called htdocs in your root. Use mv to rename the directory, and take the last /testApp off the end of the ln command from before.

Good luck with your coding, and thanks for participating in our Ruby on Rails Beta!

EDIT: Corrected the code for the symlink

This is incorrect the last / behind testApp should not be there !!

It should be:


Also shorter version is:


Make sure you are in your root though !!

For my log on my progress se http://forums.hostmysite.com/viewtopic.php?t=1593

When I try to run the following command:

ln -s /vservers/DIRECTORY/testApp/public/ /vservers/DIRECTORY/htdocs/testApp

I get the following message:

-bash-3.00$ ln -s /vservers/DIRECTORY/testApp/public /vservers/DIRECTORY/htdocs/testApp
ln: creating symbolic link `/vservers/DIRECTORY/htdocs/testApp' to `/vservers/DIRECTORY/testApp/public': No such file or directory
-bash-3.00$

Nsahlas - Make sure you're replacing the "DIRECTORY" with your actual home directory name(usually your username)

What the command does is make a shortcut from your "public" directory for your application to your web root, so your application can be accessed through the web

Let us know if you have any more problems

Ok so I am idiot as I did put "DIRECTORY" I ran the link command correctly this time and it seems to have worked however I am not getting the page to display:

http://86184.hostmyapplications.com/testApp

Thanks for the help.

Nsahlas - You might want to try following the blog tutorial. Basically the issue is you've got a Rails app created, but you don't have the database config setup or any model/controller/views created

If you go through the blog tutorial it covers how to set all of that up and get an app working

It is up an working. Thanks