Deploy Sinatra application on shared hosting using Passenger (hostmonster)

dep_sinatra.md

Deploy Sinatra application on shared hosting using Passenger (hostmonster)

Prepare the application

• Create folder ~/yourapp
• Create folder ~/yourapp/tmp
• Create file ~/yourapp/config.ru with the following content:

# encoding: UTF-8
require './appmain'
run Sinatra::Application

• Create file appmain.rb with the following content:

# appmain.rb
require 'sinatra'

get '/' do
  'Hello world!'
end

Install gems

I installed gems sinatra and rubygems (maybe the latter is not needed). This can be done either using Terminal (gem install sinatra) or using cPanel.

Configure the web root

In the ~/public_html folder create/modify .htaccess with the following content:

SetEnv GEM_HOME /home/.../ruby/gems
PassengerAppRoot /home/.../yourapp

where /home/.../ruby/gems is the path to your local folder where the gems got installed and /home/.../yourapp is a full path to ~/yourapp.

Restart the Passenger

Sometimes after updating config.ru Passenger has to be restarted (otherwise the application does not get updated). To do this simply go to ~/yourapp and

touch tmp/restart.txt

I've created a file restart.sh with the content

#!/bin/sh

touch tmp/restart.txt

and run chmod a+x restart.sh so that I can simply execute ./restart.sh to restart Passenger.