Ruby on Rails is not in the cPanel apps installer, because that installer is for PHP applications. Ruby has a tool of its own, under Software in cPanel: Setup Ruby App.
That page creates a Ruby environment of your own, picks the interpreter version, and attaches the application to an address on your domain. On the day this article was written the versions on offer ran from 2.2 to 3.4.
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One thing to know before you start: the rails command is not installed on the server. That is not a fault, it is how Ruby works: Rails is a library, and it installs inside your application environment, not system wide. Until you install it there, typing rails on the command line does nothing, and that catches everyone the first time.
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Creating the environment, step by step
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Under Software, open Setup Ruby App and create an application.
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Pick the Ruby version. For a new project, take one of the newest in the list: that is where libraries are still being published.
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Give it the code directory, which belongs outside the public web directory, and the address where the application will answer.
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Create it. The page then shows you the command that activates this environment on the command line. Keep it.
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From there, the application is served by Passenger, which bridges the web server and Ruby. Passenger looks for a startup file at the project root, config.ru, which every Rails project already ships with.
Installing Rails and the gems
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Check the account has SSH access. Some accounts have a shell and some do not: without one, this route is closed and it is best to https://www.meu.mozout.co.mz/submitticket.php.
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Connect over SSH and run the activation command first, the one the selector page gave you. This step is the whole difference: without it you are using the system Ruby and not your application one.
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Install Rails as a gem inside that environment. The rails command then exists, but only while the environment is active.
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Upload the project into the directory you named, or generate a new one there, and install the gems from the project dependency file.
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Restart the application from the selector page. Without a restart, Passenger keeps serving what it had in memory.
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Open a new SSH session and you have to activate the environment again. Half the trouble people hit when starting out comes down to this: a gem installed in a session where they forgot to activate, and an application that keeps saying it cannot find it.
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Before it goes live
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What to do |
| Production environment |
Put the application into production mode. In development, Rails reloads code on every request and shows errors to the visitor with your source around them. |
| Static assets |
Precompile the assets before going live. In production Rails expects to find them ready, and a page with no styling at all is almost always this step forgotten. |
| Secrets |
The key that decrypts the Rails credentials does not belong in the repository. Put it in the application environment variables, on the selector page. |
| Periodic jobs |
Use cPanel scheduled tasks, calling the command inside the activated environment: cron jobs. |
| Logs |
Rails logs grow without end and fill the account quietly. Rotate them on a schedule, or you meet them when the disk fills. |
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Queue workers and resident processes do not fit a shared plan. The web application starts on demand and lives happily; a background job process running without stop hits the account process ceiling and gets cut off, with no warning you will see. If your application needs that, its home is a server of its own: VPS, Cloud or Dedicated. On the ceilings, see the limits of your account.
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For the wider picture, see which technologies run here. If your application is in another language, see Django or Laravel.
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Environment created and the application will not start? Send us the domain and the directory and we will read the Passenger log with you.
Open a support ticket
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