Following the rewrite

Rails on freeBSD

Posted by charles Sun, 26 Feb 2006 23:08:00 GMT

The rewrite project has us needing to support three different databases: Oracle, postgresql and SQLServer. Rather than take the approach of using MySQL as seen in “Agile Web Development with Rails” I decided to setup rails to use postgreSQL on my freebsd desktop and laptop. Installing this FLPR environment (freebsd, lighttpd, postgreSQL and rails) turned out to be straightforward despite some sketchy documentation. Those of you using freebsd may want to give this a try. As always it is important to become root to update the ports collection, then checking to see if any currently installed ports need to be upgraded before beginning.

Having done that, then as root cd to

/usr/ports/databases/postgresql81-server/

and do

make all && make install && make clean

This will install both the postgres server and client ports, and it will also have created a pgsql user along with a /usr/local/pgsql directory. This user will own all the data files and must also own the server process. Now the databse files and inital tablespaces need to be created. So, su to the pgsql user and then do

/usr/local/bin/initdb

If you want postgreSQL to start at boot, then make sure that postgresql_enable=”YES” appears in /etc/rc.conf. Don’t start an instance of the databse just yet, but rather exit back to being root and install the rails port. Just cd to /usr/ports/www/rubygem-rails and do the usual

make all && make install && make clean

Then cd to /usr/ports/www/rubygem-redcloth and do the same make sequence.

Next the C source code adapter needs to be installed. Unfortunately, neither the rails install nor the postgreSQL install will correctly set the lib path for building the adapter, so you need to set an environment variable otherwise the build will fail. So, as root do

setenv POSTGRES_INCLUDE /usr/local/include/

follwed by

gem install postgres

Now, a database instance can be started, so, su to the pgsql user and do

/usr/local/bin/pg_ctl -D /usr/local/pgsql/data -l logfile start

You will need to create yourself as a database user (actually, as a superuser). Here is how I did myself

/usr/local/bin/createuser charles

Shall the new user be allowed to create databases? (y/n) y
Shall the new user be allowed to create more new users? (y/n) y
CREATE USER

If you feel more comfortable with a gui-interface for database administration, consider installing the pgadmin3 port.

Lastly, when you create your rails app, you will need to modify the config/database.yml file by commenting out all the lines except the postgreSQL entries and then modify those using the names of the three databases you need (ehr_* in my case):

development:
 adapter: postgresql
 database: ehr_development
 username: charles
 password:
 host: 127.0.0.1
 port: 5432

test:
 adapter: postgresql
 database: ehr_test
 username: charles
 password: 
 host: 127.0.0.1
 port: 5432

production:
 adapter: postgresql
 database: ehr_production
 username: charles
 password: 
 host: 127.0.0.1
 port: 5432

Using postgreSQL in a tiered environment is only slightly more complicated, and I’ll do a post about that sometime in the future.