I’ve been using a little tool named rv for months now to robustly manage camping apps in deployment. It consists of an init.d script, a default mongrel harness you can adjust to taste, and a .yml file for each app.

download and installation

Download version 2 from the Snax Fauna, or check out the project from svn with:

svn co svn://rubyforge.org/var/svn/fauna/rv/rv

Next, make a folder /etc/rv/.

Copy etc/init.d/rv to the /etc/init.d/ folder. Change the USER='httpd' near the top to the user the daemons should run as (never root!).

Install as a boot service (on Ubuntu) with:

$ sudo /usr/sbin/update-rc.d rv defaults

If you are not using Ubuntu you may have to do something different. Redhat uses chkconfig. Gentoo uses something else yet probably. On OS X you can try to get launchd to work, if you are bold.

usage

Copy the included harness/rv_harness.rb to your camping application’s folder. Edit it appropriately for your app and database.

Then, copy the example etc/rv/my_blog.yml file into /etc/rv. Rename and edit it appropriately for your app. You need to set the path, proxy port, and listen interface. For more apps, you can just add more .yml files.

Now you can manually start, stop or restart all your camping daemons by calling:

$ sudo /etc/init.d/rv start
$ sudo /etc/init.d/rv stop
$ sudo /etc/init.d/rv restart

apache setup

In most situations, you will also need an Apache vhost entry in httpd.conf to reference the camping proxy started by rv. Here’s one for Apache 2.2:

<VirtualHost *:80>
  ServerName myblog.j2ee.com

  ProxyRequests Off
  ProxyPass / http://127.0.0.1:3055/
  ProxyPassReverse / http://127.0.0.1:3055/
  ProxyPreserveHost On

  #Fix for Apache bug 39499
  SetEnv force-proxy-request-1.0 1
  SetEnv proxy-nokeepalive 1
</VirtualHost>

postscript

It would be really nice if someone could write a setup script for this, so you don’t have to copy stuff around by hand. It could ask you questions on initial setup, and then each time you want to add a new app.