Deploy Rails on Windows: Part 2

This post is part of a guide to deploying a small Rails application on a windows server using Oracle, Mongrel & Pen. My thinking: get it working with a simple app first, to minimise headaches later. The other posts can be found here:

1. Installing Rails
   
2. My-first-app with Oracle
   
3. Pen of pesky Mongrels

This part heavily references a tutorial provided by Oracle.

Part 2: My-first-app with Oracle

This guide assumes you are either:

• connecting to an Oracle Database installed on your local machine.
• connecting to a remote database using Oracle Instant Client installed on your local machine.

If you do not have at least the client software installed, the Ruby-Oracle driver will complain that it can’t find files such as ‘oci.dll’.


Install Oracle Database Driver

Download the driver and install with:

ruby ruby-oci8-1.0.0-rc3-mswin32.rb

You can test your connection to the database with the following one-liner:

ruby -r oci8 -e "OCI8.new('username', 'password', '127.0.0.1:1521/orcl').exec('SELECT * FROM test_table') do |r| puts r.join('|'); end"

Of course, make sure the schema & table that you are testing exists!


Create a User

Using SQL*Plus, create a user with DBA privileges that you can use for this application.

GRANT dba TO ruby IDENTIFIED BY ruby;
ALTER USER ruby DEFAULT TABLESPACE users TEMPORARY TABLESPACE temp;
EXIT

Create a Table

CREATE TABLE comics (
id NUMBER(10) NOT NULL,
title VARCHAR2(60),
issue NUMBER(4),
publisher VARCHAR2(60),
PRIMARY KEY (id)
);
CREATE SEQUENCE comics_seq;

Alternatively use this SQL file to create the application table, COMICS.

sqlplus ruby/ruby@rails @comics.sql

Note, in this case the database SID is ‘rails’. The default SID for Oracle Enterprise Edition 10g is ‘orcl’, for Express Edition it’s ‘XE’


Create a dinky Application

Your application skeleton:

rails comics_catalog
cd comics_catalog

Edit ‘comics_catalog/config/databases.yml’ – rails needs to know your login & password info.

Within your project directory, there is a directory called config and in it is a file named database.yml. You need to edit database.yml using your favorite text editor. Initially, the file will look like this:

development:
  adapter: mysql
database: rails_development
host: localhost
username: root
password:

# Warning: The database defined as 'test' will be erased and
# re-generated from your development database when you run 'rake'.
# Do not set this db to the same as development or production.
test:
  adapter: mysql
database: rails_test
host: localhost
username: root
password:

production:
  adapter: mysql
database: rails_production
host: localhost
username: root
password:

Change the development properties as follows:

development:
  adapter: oci
username: ruby
password: ruby
host: 127.0.0.1:1234/orcl

host: takes a connect string of the form <ip_address>:<port>/<database> for the machine that your Oracle instance resides on.

Use the magical scaffold command to build a web based CRUD interface to the table we created above...

ruby script/generate scaffold Comic

Now you can access your Rails Comic Catalog application on your own development machine, using your favorite Web browser. Just access the following URL: http://localhost:3000/comics/list

Phew! Done. Last step is Part 3: Pen of pesky Mongrels...