diary at Telent Netowrks

Debian, runit, chruby, bundler#

Sun, 19 Jan 2014 11:18:31 +0000

Pretty much ever since I wrote it the software that powers this blog - a Ruby Sinatra app called "My Way" - has been running on a Bytemark VM inside a tmux session, and every time I've rebooted the server I've not only had to restart it by hand but first to remember how to restart it by hand.

I'm in the process of migrating the said VM to one of Bytemark's new BigV VMs (New More RAM) and taking the opportunity to clean it up a bit first. After reading Steve Kemp's article on runit I decided to give that a go. This is notes-to-myself on what I've found so far

 :; cat /etc/sv/my-way/run 
 #!/bin/bash 
 exec 2>&1
 cd /home/my-way/my-way
 . /usr/local/share/chruby/chruby.sh
 chruby ruby-2.0.0 
 export LANG=en_GB.UTF-8
 exec chpst -u my-way -v bundle exec ruby -I lib bin/my-way.rb


 
 :; sudo update-service --add /etc/sv/my-way
 Service my-way added.

This is the script that starts the blog server, and the installation procedure thereof

Worthy of note:

  1. per convention, the run scripts (and attendant files) live in directories /etc/sv/someservicename, and these directories are are then symlinked into /etc/service by update-service
  2. chruby doesn't run in sh, so we run this script under bash
  3. it redirects stderr to stdout so the svlog process (see below) can see it
  4. it runs as root up until the chpst invocation, so the ruby that you specify needs to be in /opt/rubies and not in /home/yourusualuser/.rubies. If you ran ruby-install under sudo it will have put it in the right place.
  5. runing bundle install with the --deployment flag when installing the ruby project will have sidestepped a whole class of "can't find your gems" issues. So do that.

Next up is 

 :; cat /etc/sv/my-way/log/run 
 #!/bin/sh
 exec svlogd /var/log/my-way

This is the script that makes sure logs go somewhere. Specifically, they go to the file /var/log/my-way/current, which svlog is able (though as far as I know not yet configured) to rotate according to some defined criteria, and without needing to restart the server. The log files are owned by root, but maybe that's changeable using chpst again.

:; sudo sv  status my-way
down: my-way: 94s, normally up; run: log: (pid 13620) 48806s
:; sudo sv  start my-way
ok: run: my-way: (pid 28343) 0s
:; sudo sv  status my-way
run: my-way: (pid 28343) 8s; run: log: (pid 13620) 48818s
:; pkill ruby
:; sudo sv  status my-way
run: my-way: (pid 28379) 31s; run: log: (pid 13620) 48949s
:; sudo sv  stop my-way
ok: down: my-way: 0s, normally up

And here's how I start and stop it and stuff. Note that it magically restarted after I ran pkill ruby.

If you can read this, it works.