• Replacing your current ruby installation with a patched version
• Installing a gem to patch the code and then updating your application to load the patch.

The latter approach only postpones the inevitable, so I opted for the former. If you’re using the debian packages, it’s a simple call to aptitude update. However, if you’ve installed from source, this presents a few challenges.

The upgrade is actually quite straightforward. According to the REE Documentation, you simply need to run the new installer over top of your previous installation. This includes specifying the exact same directory name that you used to install the previous version.

As you may know, REE installs by default into /opt/ruby-enterprise-1.8.6-<year_month_day_release>. However, after completing this, you’re left with a directory name that doesn’t reflect what’s actually installed in there. If you’ve a little neurotic like I am, you’re going to want to rename that directory. However, be careful. Your Passenger configuration is likely pointing to the directory that you want to rename, so you’ll have to remember to update your apache/nginx configuration to reflect this.

When we install REE we create a symlink at /opt/ruby which points to the version of ruby that we want passenger to run. This allows us to quickly swap in/out different versions of ruby for testing/upgrading/etc.

Considering we have dozens of client applications running on distinct servers each with their own versions of REE installed, I decided to write a script to minimize the manual effort required to upgrade several production servers.

#!/bin/sh
# Author: John Trupiano
# Script to upgrade an REE installation on a hot server and maintain sane directory names
 
if [ "$(whoami)" != "root" ]; then
  echo "You need to be root to run this!"
  exit 2
fi
 
RF_RELEASE=58677
REE_VERSION=20090610
REE=ruby-enterprise-1.8.6-$REE_VERSION
URL=http://rubyforge.org/frs/download.php/$RF_RELEASE/$REE.tar.gz
 
# Determine what the most recent version of REE is that is installed
MOST_RECENT_REE_VERSION=`ls /opt | awk -F"-" '$4 > max && $2 == "enterprise" { max=$4; maxline=$0 }; END { print max }'`
MOST_RECENT_REE=ruby-enterprise-1.8.6-$MOST_RECENT_REE_VERSION
 
WORKING_DIR=/root/src
 
echo "Going to update $MOST_RECENT_REE to $REE"
 
echo "Back up previous release"
cp -R /opt/$MOST_RECENT_REE /opt/$MOST_RECENT_REE.bak
 
echo "Download new release"
mkdir -p $WORKING_DIR
cd $WORKING_DIR && wget $URL
 
echo "Untar and install over the previous release for 'upgrade' according to REE manual"
tar xzf $REE.tar.gz
./$REE/installer --auto /opt/$MOST_RECENT_REE
 
echo "Shuffle folder names to remain sane"
mv /opt/$MOST_RECENT_REE /opt/$REE && mv /opt/$MOST_RECENT_REE.bak /opt/$MOST_RECENT_REE
 
echo "Actually symlink in the new version of REE"
rm /opt/ruby && ln -s /opt/$REE /opt/ruby
 
echo "Clean up after ourselves"
rm -f $WORKING_DIR/$REE

Simply upload this script to your server, su – up to root and run it. Then restart apache/nginx so that passenger will pick up the new version of ruby. All of your gems will be maintained, and your most recent version of REE will remain in tact at /opt/ruby-enterprise-1.8.6-<old_version> in case you need it again.

View the script on github

Whenever Integrity would try to build my project, I’d get an error about rake not being able to be found: sh: rake: not found

This totally threw me. I had added it to /etc/environment

PATH="/opt/ruby/bin:$PATH"

and so it was certainly on my PATH:

john@john-ci:~$ echo $PATH
/opt/ruby/bin:/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin

I had also added it to /root/.bash_profile so that root would have it picked up:

john@john-ci:~$ sudo su -
root@john-ci:~# echo $PATH
/opt/ruby/bin:/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin

So why wasn’t Apache/Integrity picking it up? To seek this out, I opened up the Integrity source and edited /opt/ruby/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/integrity-0.1.9.3/lib/integrity/project_builder.rb to output the values of `whoami` and $PATH to help me troubleshoot.

IO.popen("(echo `whoami` && echo $PATH && cd #{scm.working_directory} && $
          |output| build.output = output.read }

Doing this yielded the following output:

www-data
/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin

At this point, I wholly expected the PATH to not include /opt/ruby/bin, so this isn’t a surprise. But why is this being set?

The Real Problem

The real issue here was that I was trying to set the PATH in scripts that only get run when a shell is entered. Since apache starts up as a system process, it is not started from a shell, and does not have a PATH associated with it. In fact, if you open up /etc/init.d/apache, you’ll see on one of the first few lines that the PATH is distinctly set:

ENV="env -i LANG=C PATH=/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin"

This was precisely the PATH I was seeing when I hacked Integrity to output its PATH just prior to failing the Rake command. Now it’s fairly obvious that I just need to add in /opt/ruby/bin to the front of that PATH, and Integrity will be able to execute all of my ruby/rubygem executables (most importantly rake).

Recap of Steps to Install

1. Download and install REE
2. Create a symlink for /opt/ruby so it’s dead simple to upgrade when a new REE comes out: sudo ln -s /opt/ruby-enterprise-whatever-version-you-installed /opt/ruby
3. edit /etc/environment to add /opt/ruby/bin to your shell PATH : PATH=/opt/ruby/bin:$PATH
4. edit ~/.bash_profile to alias sudo so that sudo can inherit your environment : alias sudo='sudo env PATH=$PATH'
5. Reload your environment to pick up the new PATH: source /etc/environment && source ~/.bash_profile
6. Install Passenger: sudo gem install passenger && passenger-install-apache2-module
7. Install Integrity Gem: sudo gem install integrity
8. Install Integrity Home: sudo integrity install --passenger ~www-data/integrity
9. Install do_sqlite3 Gem: sudo gem install do_sqlite3
10. Prepare Integrity Database: cd ~www-data/integrity && sudo integrity migrate_db config.yml
11. Grant ownership of all integrity files to www-data: sudo chown -R www-data:www-data ~www-data/integrity
12. Create Apache config for Integrity: sudo nano -w /etc/apache2/sites-available/integrity:

    
      ServerName ci.yourdomain.com
      DocumentRoot /var/www/integrity/public
    
    

13. Enable the site: sudo ln -s /etc/apache2/sites-available/integrity /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/002-integrity
14. Edit /etc/init.d/apache2 and add /opt/ruby/bin to the PATH as described above: ENV="env -i LANG=C PATH=/opt/ruby/bin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin"
15. Restart Apache: sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart
16. Navigate to http://ci.yourdomain.com/ and start adding projects.

Boy, that was a mouthful. Please let me know if you’ve also been successful, and if there are any other steps you take to set up Integrity with REE and Passenger.