I’ve been doing a little free-lance web development again lately. It’s been a while and the landscape’s changed in the 2 or 3 years since I was last freelancing. Specifically the ‘minimum requirements’ for a public facing site and the quality of the ‘cheap’ generic hosts have both increased (for the better). In light of these two factors I’ve been having a go at making some basic ‘web-presence’ sites using ruby on rails.

Learning enough rails to make a simple site was easy enough, but the deployment turned out to be a bit of a puzzle. Particularly as bluehost, whose control panel is otherwise excellent, just doesn’t seem to have its rails story sorted. To make matters worse, every “rails bluehost” tutorial out there starts with “you need SSH access” and bluehost now requires a faxed or emailed copy of the account-holder’s drivers license to grant SSH access. Seeing as my clients are generally the hosting account holders, this wasn’t an option for me.

After a bit of trial and error I’ve discovered that you can indeed deploy a basic Ruby on Rails site to bluehost without SSH access (assuming you have ftp access). Here’s how:

1. Create rails directory.Use your ftp client to create a directory alongside the {app} directory to which the domain/sub-domain points.I’ve called mine {app}_rails, but it can be called anything.

2. Upload rails app.Upload your rails app into the newly created {app}_rails directory.

3. Symlink to rails public directory using temporary PHP.We need to symlink the {app} directory (to which the domain/sub-domain points) to the {app}_rails/public directory. Ordinarily we’d use the trusty ln -s command, but we can also do it without SSH access by using PHP’s symlink function.

   Create a php script on your local machine (I’ve called mine symlink.php) with the following contents (replacing the {account} and {app} tokens with your own). Make sure the {app} directory doesn’t already exist (rename/move/delete it if it does).

   <?php symlink('/home/atfraser/public_html/maketimelapse_rails/public', '/home/atfraser/public_html/maketimelapse'); ?>

   Upload the symlink.php to an accessable directory and then browse to it in your browser. If the script succeeds you’ll be greeted with a blank page (otherwise you’ll get errors). Once run successfully, you can delete the symlink php script (it’s no longer needed).

4. Ensure dispatch.fcgi exists.To run under apache, a rails app needs fcgi dispatchers. My understanding is that rails 2.3 no longer fcgi dispatchers by default so if you didn’t use the --with-dispatches option when you created your app (I didn’t) you’ll need to create them on your local machine using the following command:

   rake rails:update:generate_dispatchers

   Then upload the created dispatch.fcgi, dispatch.cgi and dispatch.rb files from your localpublic directory to {app}_rails/public directory on bluehost.

5. Enable dispatch.fcgi in .htaccess.Create a .htaccess file inside your {app}_rails/public directory with the following contents:

   AddHandler fcgid-script .fcgi
   AddHandler cgi-script .cgi
   
   RewriteEngine On
   
   RewriteBase /
   RewriteRule ^$ index.html [QSA]
   RewriteRule ^([^.]+)$ $1.html [QSA]
   RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
   RewriteRule ^(.*)$ dispatch.fcgi [QSA,L]
   
   ErrorDocument 500 “<h2>Application error</h2>Rails application failed to start properly“

6. Check permissions using FTP client.We need to check/set some permissions. Again, we can’t use the standard chmod command without SSH access but luckily most modern ftp clients can also view/set permissions (select the file/directory then ⌘-i in Transmit or ‘right-click > File permissions’ in FileZilla). Set the appopriate permissions for the following files/directories (list courtesy Jack Danger Canty):

   File/Directory	Permission
   {app}_rails/public	755
   {app}_rails/public/.htaccess	755
   {app}_rails/public/dispatch.fcgi	755
   {app}_rails/public/dispatch.cgi	755
   {app}_rails/log	775
   {app}_rails/tmp	775

7. Handling rails gems version issues.If you're app still isn't working, check the error logs in cpanel. It may be that the version of the rails version you built against isn't available on the shared host. In this case,you'll need to either freeze the gems into your app locally (then upload the vendor/gems directory) or comment out the following line in environment.rb which refers to their specific version (risky).

   rake rails:freeze:gems

That should be it!