Installing Holla - Ruby HTTP Campfire Clone

Campfire is a really rather sexy HTTP based chat system provided by 37 signals.

I've found a clone-type application written by @maccman on Github, called Holla.  

I'm gonna have a go at installing it on Ubuntu 10.04.  It requires Ruby 1.9.2, which isn't installed by default, so that's the first hurdle. 

I'm gonna need to build it from source, probably. 

It looks like there's no backport for Lucid.  So, yeah.. Source it is.  :(.  I might have a go at wrapping it up with FPM later on. 

Here's a tutorial for 1.9.2 on 10.04.  Note: I only did it as root, because that's the default login for this VM Image I was using.  Normally I'd do it as me, but meh. Complications.

root@holla:~# apt-get install zlib1g zlib1g-dev build-essential libcurl4-openssl-dev
...

stuff happens....

We're gonna grab the 1.9.3 stable recommended snapshot from www.ruby-lang.org/en/downloads (specifically, this snapshot), and hope for the best.  I'm assuming that 1.9.3 will work, if 1.9.2 was recommended.This could be my undoing.  We shall see.

I'm aware that I could have used RVM, but as this is a server, I'd rather have native packages, or at least natively built sources. 

root@holla:~# mkdir sources
root@holla:~# cd sources/
root@holla:~/sources# wget http://ftp.ruby-lang.org/pub/ruby/1.9/ruby-1.9.3-p125.tar.gz

...

root@holla:~/sources# tar xzvf ruby-1.9.3-p125.tar.gz 

...

root@holla:~/sources# cd ruby-1.9.3-p125
root@holla:~/sources/ruby-1.9.3-p125# ./configure

... Lots of Stuff ...

root@holla:~/sources/ruby-1.9.3-p125# make

... This bit took ages ...

root@holla:~/sources/ruby-1.9.3-p125# make test

... This bit took ages too...

root@holla:~/sources/ruby-1.9.3-p125# make install
root@holla:~/sources/ruby-1.9.3-p125# ruby -v
ruby 1.9.3p125 (2012-02-16 revision 34643) [x86_64-linux]

Woot.

Right.. Next bit.

Prerequisites

Ruby 1.9.2 [*] - Done

Bundler [ ]

Redis [ ]

root@holla:~/sources# gem install bundler 
/usr/local/lib/ruby/1.9.1/yaml.rb:56:in `':
It seems your ruby installation is missing psych (for YAML output).
To eliminate this warning, please install libyaml and reinstall your ruby.
^CERROR:  Interrupted
root@holla:~/sources# gem install psych
/usr/local/lib/ruby/1.9.1/yaml.rb:56:in `':
It seems your ruby installation is missing psych (for YAML output).
To eliminate this warning, please install libyaml and reinstall your ruby.
Fetching: psych-1.2.2.gem (100%)
Building native extensions.  This could take a while...
ERROR:  Error installing psych:
	ERROR: Failed to build gem native extension.
        /usr/local/bin/ruby extconf.rb
extconf.rb:7: Use RbConfig instead of obsolete and deprecated Config.
checking for yaml.h... no
yaml.h is missing. Try 'port install libyaml +universal' or 'yum install libyaml-devel'
...
root@holla:~/sources# apt-get install libyaml-dev
root@holla:~/sources# gem install psych
...
Successfully installed psych-1.2.2
root@holla:~/sources# gem install bundler
Fetching: bundler-1.0.22.gem (100%)
Successfully installed bundler-1.0.22
1 gem installed

Bundler [*]

Redis [ ]

We'll install Redis like this, perhaps. 

I found a decent Github gist, and forked it to modify it slightly so that it works.

I only had to add `useradd` redis to make it work.. 

It even uses Upstart! <3 The gist contains a decent redis-server.conf file for upstart.

root@holla:/etc/init# vim redis-server.conf
root@holla:/etc/init# start redis-server
redis-server start/running, process 8388
root@holla:/etc/init# status redis-server
redis-server start/running, process 8388

Woot.

Redis [*]

Right.  The blogpost also says it requires Juggernaut, a node.js application server, so let's go ahead and figure out node.js for Ubunu 10.04 while we're here.

Here's someone elses blogpost on the subject. 

I'm quietly horrified that these searches "Installing on Ubuntu 10.04" doesn't automatically return someone's PPA, or public apt repo. - It looks like it's available for Oneiric and Precise from launchpad PPAs, but not for Lucid. 

So, again.. Source it is? :(

root@holla:/etc/init# apt-get install g++ curl libssl-dev apache2-utils
root@holla:/etc/init# apt-get install git-core

root@holla:~/sources# git clone git://github.com/ry/node.git

F*ck that.  It's huge.

root@holla:~/sources# wget http://nodejs.org/dist/v0.6.11/node-v0.6.11.tar.gz

./configure, make, make install.. and so on.

Apparently these are required.

gem install juggernaut
npm install -g juggernaut

root@holla:~/sources# cd ..
root@holla:~# mkdir app
root@holla:~# cd app
root@holla:~/app# git clone https://github.com/maccman/holla.git
root@holla:~/app# cd holla/

Now dependencies.. libxml2 and libxslt and libsqlite3-dev

root@holla:~/app/holla# apt-get install libxml2 libxml2-dev libxslt1-dev libxslt1.1 libsqlite3-dev

root@holla:~/app/holla# bundle install

... Stuff happens...

This bit took ages for me.

It was trying to install some Bundle/debug shite, so i killed that off, and edited the Gemfile to remove the Debug lines.

root@holla:~/app/holla# start redis-server
root@holla:~/app/holla# rake db:migrate
root@holla:~/app/holla# rails server thin
root@holla:~/app/holla# gem install rails
root@holla:~/app/holla#  rails server thin

Right.  Now there's an instance of Holla running on port 3000 on 0.0.0.0.  Excellent.

If you head over to your holla server (mine's just http://holla:3000/ thanks to DNS being ace)

and View Source, you'll see that there's something expected on port 8080 of "localhost".  This is because there's a bit of lame config that's not actually a) documented, or b) shown for production usage.

I put the Holla git clone-down in /srv/holla.

Head over there, and you need to find a line that contains "localhost", as that's where the config lives, for that bit of insanity.

grep localhost -R .

./config/initializers/juggernaut.rb:ActionView::Helpers::AssetTagHelper.register_javascript_expansion :juggernaut => ["http://localhost:8080/application.js"]

Ah ha!

Just need to change "localhost" to the hostname of your Holla server, save it and restart the rails app.

Good stuff.

At this point, it worked for me, except Juggernaut (the push server) wasn't running.. 

In /etc/init (upstart's config directory), i made a couple of files "holla-app.conf" and "holla-push.conf"

holla-push.conf

description "holla push server"
start on runlevel [2345]
stop on shutdown
exec /usr/local/bin/juggernaut --port 8080 
respawn

and

holla-app.conf

description "holla push server"
start on runlevel [2345]
stop on shutdown
chdir /srv/holla
exec /usr/local/bin/rails server thin
respawn

root@holla:~# start holla-app
root@holla:~# start holla-push

And the server's working on 0.0.0.0:3000, with push message support.

Excellent.

I tried after this to run it with Passenger and mod_rails.  It wasn't particularly successful, so I ditched it, and instead modified the line

exec /usr/local/bin/rails server thin

in /etc/init/holla-app.conf

to

exec /usr/local/bin/rails server thin -p 80

So that it runs on port 80.  Not secure.  Not recommended. etc.. But it does run.