The goal of this article is to create a "Production-Quality" Rails Server. Thus, the best possible technologies (strictly my opinion) have been selected at the time of this writing to achieve this goal.

Unlike other developers, I prefer to install my Rails Applications under Web Subdirectories, such as http://www.not404.com/MyRailsApp, instead of running it as a Root Application of a Web Root, such as http://MyRailsApp.not404.com/. These instructions are geared for how I lay things out, but will let you know what to adjust in order to run your Rails Apps as traditional Web-Root Applications.

You may also notice that these instructions are SQLite3-oriented. This is intentional. IMHO, it's better to use the simplest-case database to prove that everything else is properly stitched together. Then, once you're satisfied that everything is properly locked down and performance-tuned, you can focus your attention on tying your Rails Application to a real database.

• Fedora Core (6 or later)
• Ruby on Rails
• Mongrel Ruby Application Server
• Lighttpd Web Server
• Various Plumbing and Configuration "Best Practices" to stitch it all together. :-)

Related Articles:

• How To Connect To SQL2005 From Ruby On Rails on Fedora Core 6 (Linux)

While working on some projects at a large financial institution, I had a need to access my Internet Servers for various reasons.  While I had been granted the typical Internet Access (Web Access) through the company's Microsoft Proxy Server to download files and patch updates, the proxy server was not configured to allow me access to the most useful protocol of all, OpenSSH.

After several days of trying various solutions, I settled on a quick and dirty (and yet, surprisingly convenient) solution:  NTLM-Authenticate myself against the Microsoft Proxy Server so it will allow me to make an outgoing connection; and configure OpenSSH on one of my Internet Servers to listen in on one of the "Approved" ports that Microsoft Proxy Server will allow:  Port 80 (http), Port 443 (https), or Port 563 (snews).

With that approach in mind, and not wanting to reinvent the wheel, I took an already excellent SSH Proxy tool written by Shun-Ichi Goto, commonly known as connect.c.  It's a great tool that does the job for getting through most other http-proxy servers.  I simply added some NTLM Authentication support to his work, and was soon able to initiate ssh connections through the Microsoft Proxy Server that was troubling me.

I've been very fortunate to lead an ETL project, using Ruby on Rails as the core engine. With a few weeks devoted to "Pure R&D Effort", I have come up with a mini-recipe of tweaks and connectivity layers necessary to connect a Rails Application (on Linux) to a SQL2005 Database.  I hope my published instructions here are eloquent and sufficient enough to guide you through your own efforts along such a path.

System Requirements and Configuration Steps Involved

• UnixODBC >= 2.2.11
• FreeTDS >= 0.63
• Configure an ODBC DSN
• Ruby ODBC >= 0.996
• Rails ODBC >= 1.1
• Ruby DBI >= 0.1.1
• Various Plumbing and Best-Practices

Disclaimer

This is not my original content - it is a snapshot of a controversial PerlMonks.com article that may very well be deleted by that site.  If you are the original author, and you do not want this content mirrored, please let me know by clicking on 'New Ticket' above. Thanks!