Rainy Gemserver

Host your own private gemserver on a Digital Ocean droplet using GemInABox, Unicorn, and NGINX.

Setting up your Gem Server on a Droplet

Step 1: Create a Droplet for your gems

First, create a new droplet in digital ocean. You can use the most basic size.

Step 2: Add ruby to your droplet

After you have created your droplet, it is time to get things setup. SSH into your droplet:

ssh root@12.345.67.89

Note: Replace 12.345.67.89 with your droplet's ip address

Now that you're in your droplet, you will find that you do not have ruby installed. You will need to install the version of ruby you plan to run the gemserver with. You can use snap to perform your install. To determine which versions of ruby are available via snap, run the command:

snap info ruby

The version at the tob of the list under stable: ... will be what gets installed if you were to run:

snap install ruby --classic

If the stable version is not the one you wish to use, you can specify a previous version by referencing it's channel. For instance, say we wanted to use ruby 2.5.7, then we could install it with:

snap install ruby --channel 2.5/stable --classic

We are going to want our gems to be added to our PATH. As such, modify your .bashrc to include:

export PATH=$PATH:~/.gem/bin

You can resource your .bashrc with

source ~/.bashrc

Step 3: Cloning the rainy-gemserver project

Once you have ruby installed, navigate to the /root directory and clone the rainy-gemserver repo:

cd ~/ && git clone https://github.com/navyhockey56/rainy-gemserver.git

This will provide you with all the file you need to get things running. Now that you have the project, you should install the dependencies:

cd ~/rainy-gemserver
bundle install

Step 4: Setting up your username/password for basic auth

You will most likely want to change the username/password required for basic auth. If so, you can edit the config.ru file to specify as many username/password combos as you'd like. If you would like to remove the basic auth requirement, this can also be done by modifying the config.ru file.

Step 5: Making rainy-gemserver a service

Now it's time to create the rainy-gemserver service for running the server. The init.d script is already written and contained within the init.d folder of the project. You will need to move this file over to your /etc/init.d/ directory and configure it as well:

cp init.d/rainy-gemserver /etc/init.d/
update-rc.d rainy_gemserver defaults

You will now be able to stop/start/restart/status rainy-gemserver with systemctl, for example:

service rainy-gemserver start
service rainy-gemserver restart
service rainy-gemserver stop
service rainy-gemserver status

Make sure to start the rainy-gemserver before moving onto the next section.

Exposing your Gemserver to the Internet

Now you've got your private Gemserver! Unfortinately, you can't access it from outside your Droplet at this point. We will use nginx to expose our gemserver to the internet.

Step 1: Install NGINX

First up is installing nginx so that we can expose our gemserver:

apt-get update
apt-get install nginx

Step 2: Configuring NGINX

NGINX keeps its configurations within /etc/ngnix. Start by moving into this directory:

cd /etc/nginx

You should find a folder called sites-available within your ngnix config directory. We are going to replace the sites-available/default file with the one provided in the rainy-gemserver repo and then reload nginx:

cp ~/rainy-gemserver/ngnix/sites-available/default /etc/ngnix/sites-available
service nginx restart

Step 3: Access your GemServer

You will now be able to access your gemserver online! To do this, open http://12.345.67.89:9292 in your favorite browser. Upon doing so, you should be prompted for your basic auth creds; when entered correctly, you should then be taken to your GemInABox homepage. Note: Replace 12.345.67.89 with your droplet's ip address.

Adding gems to your gem server

You can now upload gems to your private gem server using the GemInABox homepage or by uploading the gem from the command line.

To upload from the command line, build the gem locally, then use your local copy of geminabox to push the gem to your gem server with basic auth:

gem build my-gem.gemspec
gem inabox my-gem-1.0.0.gem -g http://some_username:a_password@12.345.67.89:9292

Note: Replace 12.345.67.89 with your droplet's ip address
Note: Replace some_username with your basic auth username, and a_password with your basic auth password.

sballan/rainy-gemserver