Webbynode Installation

Creating a new “webby” (VPS instance) for yourself is relatively straight forward. Webbynode provides a nice AJAX powered installation console which will show you the progress of the installation as you progress

Webbynode has what they call ReadyStacks which are essentially a preconfiured set of tools to be installed on your server instance. You should note that you will not be asked about these stacks during the initial setup. Instead, you just get an empty server instance configured with Linux. If you want the ReadyStack (and you do if you want to install Spree), then you need to click “Redeploy” in the webadmin interface after the initial setup is complete. Click the “ReadyStack” button and then choose the “Rails” option.

You will then be presented with a series of choices for configuring your stack. Choose a webserver and database according to your taste. Under the section “Rails Application” you will be given a choice of “Ready App.” Since we’re installing Spree just choose the “Spree E-Commerce” option.

In the next step you will configure the selected components. You’ll be able to configure the Spree settings right here from the web interface (admin username and password, etc.) I’ve noticed that if you select the default path of /var/rails it actually installs Spree to /var/rails/store. You will need Rails version 2.3.2 and Ruby 1.8.7.

Currently the RPM configuration option seems to have no effect. If you’re planning on installing this great tool from New Rellic then you’ll have to add the config/newrelic.yml file to your Spree app manually after the ready stack is created.

Now its time to sit back and wait for the stack to be built. It takes a few minutes but the console is interactive so you can monitor its progress.

You should now be up and running with your new Spree instance. You’ll note the store is empty (no sample data.) If you’d like to create some sample data you can SSH into your store directory and run the following

rake db:sample

Apache can also be restarted with

/etc/init.d/apache2 restart

Phusion Passenger Confiugration Notes

If you are using Phusion Passenger, you may notice that the initial page load takes several seconds after the site has been idle for some time. You can fix this by adding the following line to the passenger configuration file in /etc/apache2/conf.d/passenger.conf:

PassengerPoolIdleTime 0