RVM, Unicorn, and Nginx on Startup in Ubuntu
I run a “webserver” in my house on an old netbook for reasons I’ll get into in another blog post. I am only serving a single static html file which can be done much easier than Nginx and Unicorn, but that is no fun! This gave me an opportunity to learn a little more about both.
The scenario I am working with is unicorn installed in RVM with Nginx sitting in front of it. This all lives on Ubuntu 15.04. On a reboot, Nginx fires up fine but unicorn does not. There was a little hassle with doing this because I installed Unicorn in RVM and not globally. I had to start the process from “within” RVM, or rather start unicorn from within a specific gemset.
Looking on the RVM site there is a way to alias a gemset. This is not necessary but it gives two advantages. One, it can make for less typing and easier remembering and. Two, a ruby version can get updated on an gemset and the alias just needs to be re-pointed to the new version. The init scripts can remain unchanged. Again, This is not necessary to get this to work. It is just a cool feature I didn’t know about it before researching this topic, but it is user friendly.
From there it was using a Unicorn init script that I came across. As the script states I had to add a unicorn.conf file to /etc/unicorn and the init script would take care of the rest. At this point I was able to “sudo /etc/init.d/unicorn start|stop” to control the service.
The last thing that I needed to do was start the unicorn service on boot. To do this you can execute “.udo update-rc.d defaults” where, in my case, was “unicorn”. This will attempt to start the service on boot. To get a more in-depth look at what exactly update-rc.d does, take a look here.