Rails on GoDaddy

July 31, 2007

I decided to play with Ruby on Rails a little more and was just reminded of the painful process to get Rails working at GoDaddy.

First, you can have Java or Rails, but not both. But as I posted earlier, Java is near useless at GoDaddy anyway.

So, the key steps to getting your Ruby on Rails app deployed at GoDaddy are:

Setup at GoDaddy:

1. Log in to the GoDaddy Hosting Control Center
2. Make sure Java is disabled (under Language Options). If it is enabled, you can’t deploy a Rails application. Change the setting to none (and you’ll need to wait 24 hours for your site(s) to be moved to a new server).
3. Log into the CGI control panel and create a Rails application directory.
4. Create a symbolic link to your newly created rails directory.

Local Edits:

1. Freeze your gems: rake rails:freeze:gems
2. Edit your dispatch.* files to reference #!/usr/local/bin/ruby

Upload:

1. Upload your rails application to the rails directory.
2. Chmod the dispatch.* files to 755 (in FileZilla, right click and select File Attributes).
3. Wait. GoDaddy won’t recognized new .htaccess files for about an hour, so go do something else and come back later.

Test:

1. Test your app. Hopefully it works. If not, good luck. A couple things you can try: 1a. Enable your Error Log in the hosting control panel, wait an hour, try again and view your log file in the CGI control panel. 1b. Download the /log/production.log log file.
2. Change to FastCGI. Update your .htaccess file and change the dispatch.cgi reference to dispatch.fcgi.

I omitted the DB setup. You’ll need to create a database using the control panel and update your database.yml file with the appropriate information.

It isn’t great, but if you already have GoDaddy hosting, it is workable.