Rails Sample App on OpenShift

Quickstart rails application for openshift.

The easiest way to install this application is to use the OpenShift Instant Application. If you'd like to install it manually, follow these directions.

OpenShift Considerations

These are some special considerations you may need to keep in mind when running your application on OpenShift.

Database

Your application is configured to use your OpenShift database in Production mode. Because it addresses these databases based on OpenShift Environment Variables, you will need to change these if you want to use your application in Production mode outside of OpenShift.

Assets

Your application is set to precompile the assets every time you push to OpenShift, so there is no need to store them in your git repository!

Since your repository is non-persistent, we cannot store them directly in public/assets (which is the default location), because it would be overwritten the next time you pushed your application. Instead, we create a symlink from your persistent $OPENSHIFT_DATA_DIR/assets into your public folder, which Rails will then use.

If you need to store your precompiled assets in your repository, you will need to modify your .openshift/action_hooks/pre_build to NOT create the symlink, otherwise it will overwrite your public/assets folder.

Security

Since these quickstarts are shared code, we had to take special consideration to ensure that security related configuration variables was unique across applications. To accomplish this, we modified some of the configuration files (shown in the table below). Now instead of using the same default values, your application will generate it's own value using the initialize_secret function from lib/openshift_secret_generator.rb.

This function uses a secure environment variable that only exists on your deployed application and not in your code anywhere. You can then use the function to generate any variables you need. Each of them will be unique so initialize_secret(:a) will differ from initialize_secret(:b) but they will also be consistent, so any time your application uses them (even across reboots), you know they will be the same.

Modified Files

File	Variable
config/initializers/secret_token.rb	Railsapp::Application.config.secret_token
config/initializers/session_store.rb	Railsapp::Application.config.session_store

Manual Installation

Create an account at http://openshift.redhat.com/
Create a rails application
```
rhc app create -a railsapp -t ruby-1.9
```

Add mysql support to your application

rhc app cartridge add -a railsapp -c mysql-5.1

Add this upstream Rails quickstart repository

cd railsapp
git remote add upstream -m master git://github.com/openshift/rails-example.git
git pull -s recursive -X theirs upstream master

Push your new code
```
git push
```
That's it! Enjoy your new Rails application!

pummer / yourdoor