Electronic Flight Cards

Getting Started

Install Ruby

First you'll need Ruby installed. The simplest way to do this in a unix environment is to install a Ruby version manager like rvm or rbenv. Once one of those are installed, follow the directions for that version manager for installing Ruby 2.5.3. For rvm it will look like this:

rvm install 2.5.3

Install dependencies

You'll need to install PostgreSQL for the database.

sudo apt install postgresql postgresql-contrib

And the Bundler gem for handling Ruby dependencies.

gem install bundler

Now that Ruby and Postgres are installed, clone this repo to the place you want to run it from (/srv/www is one option).

git clone git@github.com:getabetterpic/flight_cards.git

Once it's cloned, cd into the repo and run bundle install to install the Ruby dependencies. This may take a while.

Set up the database

Before we can set up the database, we need to add a new Postgres user. The most straightforward way is to set up a user with the same name as the Linux user you're going to use to run the server. If this is on a Raspberry Pi, the user is normally pi so we'll use that in these examples.

First switch to the postgres user (this should have been created when installing Postgres). All following commands to set up the new Postgres user should be run under this postgres Linux user.

sudo su postgres

Now create the pi database user and give it access to create databases:

createuser pi --createdb -P

The -P option will make it prompt for a password. Remember this password, we'll need it soon.

Now we can exit out of the postgres Linux user:

exit

Now with the database user created, we need to add the password somewhere the server can access it. We'll put it in an environment variable that is referenced by the config/database.yml file. Open up the pi Linux user's .bashrc file and add the following line:

export POSTGRES_DEV_PASSWORD=<password for database user>

Save the file and close it.

We should be able to create the database now. Back in the dir where you cloned the repo, run rake db:create to create the database and rake db:migrate to add the tables.

Install NGINX

Here's a good article on how to do this:

https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-install-nginx-on-ubuntu-18-04

Additional steps

• Point NGINX to serve port 80 to the unix socket Puma (the Rails application server) will be using.
  • This will be unix:///tmp/puma.sock.
• Precompile assets with rake assets:precompile
• Boot the Rails server with puma -b unix:///tmp/puma.sock (you'll need to be in the Rails app directory for this)