Pay it Forward: New System Setup Notes

In this new series of posts I'm calling "Pay it Forward", I am attempting to publish notes that I keep on performing common but involved tasks in the hopes that they will help other people, as well as be a resource for myself the next time I need to do it.

In this installment, I will be guiding the reader through the installation and setup of a Linux server with a configurable version of Ruby, and recent versions of MySQL. My current server environment is RedHat-based (Fedora) so the commands below that interact with the package manager use yum. Look for updates that include apt instructions as I have recently started diving into Debian with the Raspberry Pi.

Conventions

In the shell code snippets below, I will use the following conventions at the beginning of a line:

% means the command is to be executed as root
$ means the command may be executed as a normal user.
> means the line is to be interpreted as contents of a file opened on the line before

Most root commands can be executed under sudo, and it is recommended that the follower of this guide take that route.

Note: For those wondering why I used %, instead of #, it's because the syntax highlighting treats the hash as a comment mark.

Packages

I prefer to start with as bare-bones an OS install as possible. In the case of Fedora, I use a "nobase" install from a kickstart script. From here, I can build up just the packages I need and nothing else.

% yum install yum-plugin-fastestmirror yum-presto
% yum install tar make unzip gcc zlib-devel readline-devel openssl-devel git \
  patch automake gcc-c++ kernel-devel bind-utils wget whois vim

System Essentials

If this server is going into production, it is a good idea to disallow root login via the network. This should be something that can only be done while physically present at the machine. All remote access should be accomplished through another user account with sudo privileges, which they must use in order to perform sensitive actions. Here is a simple administrator setup to get you started.

% useradd -c "Administrator" -G wheel admin
% $EDITOR /etc/ssh/sshd_config
> PermitRootLogin no
% systemctl restart sshd.service

Ruby Setup

In my local development, I use the fantastic rbenv and ruby-build packages in order to install and set a shell-local ruby version custom for the task or codebase at hand. This allows me to use an old version of Ruby for legacy code and play with the latest versions on toy projects. On a production server, however, I prefer to install just one version, the exact version that the target code requires. To that end, I install just ruby-build and then use it to do a system-wide installation.

% git clone https://github.com/sstephenson/ruby-build.git /usr/local/ruby-build
% $EDITOR /etc/profile.d/ruby-build.sh
> pathmunge "/usr/local/ruby-build/bin"

Reload your shell in order to get ruby-build munged into your path.

% ruby-build install «version»
% gem update --system
% gem install rake bundler --no-rdoc --no-ri

Note: If you are installing Ruby version 1.8.7 on a Fedora server, be sure to apply this patch, otherwise you will get errors when trying to run your scripts. The patch is specifically for ruby-1.8.7-p358, but all occurances of "358" may be replaced with "370" in order to use the later version.

MySQL Setup

If your application requires a SQL-style database, it's hard to beat the simplicity of MySQL for both setup and use. While I have been learning more about PostgreSQL recently for its powerful features, I still find MySQL to be a great starting point.

% yum install mysql-server mysql-devel
% chkconfig --level 24 mysqld on
% systemctl start mysqld.service
% mysqladmin -uroot -h `hostname` password «new password»
% mysqladmin -uroot -h localhost password «new password»
% mysql -uroot -p mysql
> delete from user where User='';
> exit

Great, now we have a basic database server setup with the anonymous user removed and a password set for the root user. Let's go ahead and create a new database for our application to use, as well as a non-root user which will only have permissions for this database.

% mysqladmin -uroot -p «database name»
% mysql -uroot -p
> create user '«username»'@'localhost' identified by '«password»';
> grant all privileges on «database name».* to '«username»'@'localhost';
> flush privileges;
> exit

You can test this user out with a quick call to mysql -u«username» -p to make sure the password works.

Voltz Makes