Shane Sveller » deployment

Redmine and Passenger bugfix

Shane — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 15:15:25 +0000

For those of you who are running Redmine on Phusion Passenger, if you have certain versions of the RedCloth gem installed, you are in for some trouble.

I was getting something along the lines of:

Error message:
    superclass must be a Class (Module given)
Exception class:
    TypeError
Application root:
    /var/rails/redmine-0.7

This was on Ubuntu Hardy 8.04.1, with Apache 2.2.8-1, Ruby Enterprise Edition 080704 (I think), and Passenger 2.0.2, with Redmine from SVN-stable r1729.

A simple solution that worked perfectly for me was to remove ALL version of the RedCloth gem, allowing Redmine to use its own included version of RC.

gem uninstall RedCloth

One of the responses on that bug thread also indicates that gem version 3.0.4 of RedCloth is the most recent version compatible with Redmine, so you could also try using (only) that version.

Passenger and RubyEnt updates

Shane — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 15:01:00 +0000

Updated my web server with Ruby Enterprise Edition 1.8.6-20080810 and Phusion Passenger 2.0.3 successfully. Both releases feature bugfixes for security issues and the like. My web server currently powers this blog, a Redmine instance for my own projects, and some “production” servers for a few Rails apps I’m writing right now.

I’d highly recommend Passenger and RubyEnt for low-volume or even high-traffic production Rails servers. It has greatly simplified my deployment and performance on a VPS with, say, 540MB of RAM is stellar. If you set the idle timeout to something huge, you can get almost Nginx+Mongrel/Thin level performance even on a low-traffic server; otherwise you have to wait a brief time (10-15 seconds) when the app has been idle for a while.

Another successful Passenger deployment

Shane — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 18:16:38 +0000

This morning, as a result of a hardware failure on my home server, I decided to move my Redmine devtracker to my Linode host.I used:

Ubuntu Server 8.04 AMD64
Apache2-prefork 2.2.8
Passenger 2.0.1
Ruby Enterprise Edition 1.8.6-20080624
Redmine 0.7 stable (SVN r1547)

My apache vhost is as follows:


  ServerName dev.shanesveller.com

  DocumentRoot /var/rails/redmine-0.7/public


   Options FollowSymLinks
   AllowOverride None
   Order allow,deny
   Allow from all


  # Custom log file locations
  # ErrorLog  /var/rails/redmine/log/error.log
  # CustomLog /var/rails/redmine/log/access.log combined

The passage in the middle is there because my CSS styles and images were missing. This is explained in the User’s Guide.

This allows me to serve my WordPress blog and my Redmine tracker and use about 260MB of RAM. If you take off the buffers and cache memory, it’s actually more like 110MB.

To enable Passenger and RubyEE in Apache, I used the following file in /etc/apache2/conf.d/passenger:

   LoadModule passenger_module /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/passenger-2.0.1/ext/apache2/mod_passenger.so
   PassengerRoot /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/passenger-2.0.1
   RailsRuby /opt/ruby-enterprise/bin/ruby

The relevant Ubuntu packages are:

apache2 apache2-prefork-dev apache2-mpm-prefork build-essential ruby1.8-dev ruby ri rake irb rdoc libmysqlclient15-dev libopenssl-ruby