Setting up a Development Machine With PHP, Lighty, Ruby, and Python

Feb 6, 2009 - 6 minutes

After getting my new mac book pro I had an extra laptop sitting around… so why not turn it into a little low power development box My goal is to get LigHTTPD, Ruby on Rails, PHP, MySQL, and Python to work together with lighty.

Step 1: Install Lighty

wget http://www.lighttpd.net/download/lighttpd-1.4.20.tar.gz

gunzip lighttpd-1.4.20.tar.gz

tar -xvf lighttpd-1.4.20.tar

cd lighttpd-1.4.20

./configure

Here is a list of errors / fixes encountered while doing this from a bare-bones net install. Run ./configure after each one to see what else is broken / needs to be installed.

Error	Fix
configure: error: no acceptable C compiler found in $PATH	yum install gcc
configure: error: pcre-config not found, install the pcre-devel package or build with –without-pcre	yum install pcre
configure: error: zlib-headers and/or libs where not found, install them or build with –without-zlib	yum install zlib
configure: error: bzip2-headers and/or libs where not found, install them or build with –without-bzip2	yum install bzip*

Copy the lighttpd conf to somewhere easy to find:

cp doc/lighttpd.conf /home/lighttpd.conf

make make install

Now onto PHP:

yum install php

That’s done easily enough. Verify it’s installed:

Verify python’s installed:

[root@localhost lighttpd-1.4.20]# python Python 2.4.3 (#1, May 24 2008, 13:47:28) [GCC 4.1.2 20070626 (Red Hat 4.1.2-14)] on linux2 Type “help”, “copyright”, “credits” or “license” for more information. >>>

(hit ctrl+d to exit the python interpreter)

Install MySQL:

yum install mysql*

( I just install them all as this is a dev server anyways )

Everything went okay so now onto Ruby

yum install ruby*

Everything went okay, and all the software is installed. Now it’s time to configure them.

First lets get PHP working with Lighty.

nano /etc/php.ini

hit CTRL+V to page down real quick…. at the bottom of the file add:

cgi.fix_pathinfo = 1

Save the file and exit.

First:

whereis php-cgi

It should be in /usr/bin/php-cgi

Second:

adduser dev

echo “ >> /home/dev/index.php

Now lets open lighttpd.conf

nano /home/lighttpd.conf

Un-comment the fastcgi, rewrite, and redirect lines.

Lets change the document root to be /home/dev/

Lets also make sure we change the user of Lighty:

## change uid to (default: don’t care) server.username = “dev”

change uid to (default: don’t care)

server.groupname = “dev”

Now scroll down and add this to the bottom:

fastcgi.server = ( “.php” => (( “bin-path” => “/usr/bin/php-cgi”, “socket” => “/tmp/php.socket” )))

Exit and save the file.

Lets try starting Lighty:

lighttpd -f /home/lighttpd.conf 2009-01-27 15:02:20: (log.c.84) opening errorlog ‘/var/log/lighttpd/error.log’ failed: No such file or directory 2009-01-27 15:02:20: (server.c.888) Opening errorlog failed. Going down.

mkdir /var/log/lighttpd touch /var/log/lighttpd/error.log; touch /var/log/lighttpd/access.log; chown -R dev:dev /var/log/lighttpd;

Start lighty again and you’re all set!

Now lets see if PHP worked…. browse to your dev server’s ip and you should see the php info page, and all is well.

Now lets get Ruby working Now lets get Ruby-FCGI

wget http://sugi.nemui.org/pub/ruby/fcgi/ruby-fcgi-0.8.6.tar.gz; gunzip ruby-fcgi-0.8.6.tar.gz ; tar -xvf ruby-fcgi-0.8.6.tar; cd ruby-fcgi-0.8.6 ruby install.rb config

This fails so lets check for errors:

[root@localhost ruby-fcgi-0.8.6]# cat ext/fcgi/mkmf.log have_header: checking for fcgiapp.h… ——————– no

“gcc -E -I. -I/usr/lib/ruby/1.8/i386-linux -I/root/tmp/ruby-fcgi-0.8.6/ext/fcgi -O2 -g -pipe -Wall -Wp,-D_FORTIFY_SOURCE=2 -fexceptions -fstack-protector –param=ssp-buffer-size=4 -m32 -march=i386 -mtune=generic -fasynchronous-unwind-tables -Wall -fno-strict-aliasing -fPIC conftest.c -o conftest.i” conftest.c:1:21: error: fcgiapp.h: No such file or directory checked program was: /* begin / 1: #include / end */

have_header: checking for fastcgi/fcgiapp.h… ——————– no

“gcc -E -I. -I/usr/lib/ruby/1.8/i386-linux -I/root/tmp/ruby-fcgi-0.8.6/ext/fcgi -O2 -g -pipe -Wall -Wp,-D_FORTIFY_SOURCE=2 -fexceptions -fstack-protector –param=ssp-buffer-size=4 -m32 -march=i386 -mtune=generic -fasynchronous-unwind-tables -Wall -fno-strict-aliasing -fPIC conftest.c -o conftest.i” conftest.c:1:29: error: fastcgi/fcgiapp.h: No such file or directory checked program was: /* begin / 1: #include / end */

——————–

Fix:

wget http://www.fastcgi.com/dist/fcgi-2.4.0.tar.gz; gunzip fcgi-2.4.0.tar.gz; tar -xvf fcgi-2.4.0.tar; cd fcgi-2.4.0 ./configure make make install

Now lets try ruby again!

ruby install.rb config ruby install.rb setup ruby install.rb install

Done :).

Now install gem: wget http://rubyforge.org/frs/download.php/45905/rubygems-1.3.1.tgz

Gunzip, tar -xvf it and then compile it:

run

ruby setup.rb

That should install Gem for you.

Next you need to install Rails, which can be done very easily now

gem install rails

When initially doing this I ran into an issue of Rails complaining (specifically when running the ruby script/server command) about not being able to find the specific database information.

First: start a project

cd /home/ mkdir ruby cd ruby rails demo

That creates your first demo project.

Now lets make a controller:

ruby script/generate controller hello exists app/controllers/ exists app/helpers/ create app/views/hello exists test/functional/ create app/controllers/hello_controller.rb create test/functional/hello_controller_test.rb create app/helpers/hello_helper.rb

Start the development server:

ruby script/server => Booting Mongrel (use 'script/server webrick' to force WEBrick) => Rails 2.2.2 application starting on http://0.0.0.0:3000 => Call with -d to detach => Ctrl-C to shutdown server ** Starting Mongrel listening at 0.0.0.0:3000 ** Starting Rails with development environment... ** Rails loaded. ** Loading any Rails specific GemPlugins ** Signals ready. TERM => stop. USR2 => restart. INT => stop (no restart). ** Rails signals registered. HUP => reload (without restart). It might not work well. ** Mongrel 1.1.5 available at 0.0.0.0:3000 ** Use CTRL-C to stop.

Browse to http://yourserverip:3000/hello Error: MissingSourceFile in HelloController#index

no such file to load – sqlite3

RAILS_ROOT: /home/ruby/demo

To fix:

Hit Ctrl+C to stop the web daemon, then:

cd config nano database.yml

Change it to read something like:

development: adapter: mysql encoding: utf8 database: ruby username: root password: PASSWORD

Now to install Ruby MySQL:

gem install mysql –
–with-mysql-include=/usr/include/mysql
–with-mysql-lib=/usr/lib64/mysql

Now try running the server again

ruby script/server

and browse to http://yourserverip:3000/hello and you should get another error: Unknown action

No action responded to index. Actions:

To fix, first exit the web server (Ctrl+C), then:

cd app cd controllers nano hello_controller.rb

Change file to look like this:

class HelloController < ApplicationController def index render :text => “Hello World” end end

Save and exit, and then:

cd ../../; ruby script/server

Browse to http://yourserverip:3000/hello

And voila, Rails! You should see: “Hello World!”

I did however find a simpler way to run this using Mongrel:

gem install mongrel

Wait a few for it to install and then just change to your demo directory:

mongrel_rails start -d

Now to setup a Python (via Django)

wget http://www.djangoproject.com/download/1.0.2/tarball/ tar -xzvf Django-1.0.2-final.tar.gz cd Django-1.0.2-final python setup.py install

cd /home/ mkdir python cd python django-admin.py startproject demo cd demo python manage.py runserver 0.0.0.0:8000

Browsing to http://yourserverip:8000/ you should see:

It worked! Congratulations on your first Django-powered page.

You’re now all set up with one server that can serve PHP, Python, and Ruby pages.

This is by no means a programming tutorial, I was simply showing how to get the basics set up for people to start quickly learning PHP, Python (web programming), and Ruby on Rails.

Please leave a comment if you spot a bug / error somewhere!

{ Josh Rendek }

Setting up a Development Machine With PHP, Lighty, Ruby, and Python

change uid to (default: don’t care)

Change file to look like this:

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