1. Rails.vim by Tim Pope

To install just copy autoload/rails.vim, plugin/rails.vim, and doc/rails.txt to corresponding directories in ~/.vim

Vim scripts section has a full description of the functionality. Some highlights:

• Easy navigation between models, controllers and views with :Rmodel, :Rview, :Rcontroller commands
• Syntax highlighting
• CTRL-X CTRL-U for autocompletion
• :Rtree for project tree (see item 2)

2. NERD Tree by Marty Grenfell

Another must-have. Provides you with an easy way to navigate your project tree. Rails.vim nicely integrates with this one.

3. Colour schemas

If you want to save your eyes – use dark background when developing. Personally I prefer one of the standard vim themes – Desert , but Ocean Deep is also very good.

Copy theme file to ~/.vim/colors and then use

:colorscheme oceandeep

command to apply it.

In case you didn’t know – Adobe doesn’t have stable Flash player version for 64-bit Linux. Adobe Labs offer preview release codenamed “Square” for 64-bit platforms. It can’t be installed via standard Ubuntu repositories, so get ready to get your hands dirty in the terminal.

To install 64-bit Flash player plugin do the following:

1. Download the latest version of the plugin at http://labs.adobe.com/downloads/flashplayer10_square.html (currently it is v.10.2 preview 3 from November 30th, 2010)
2. Go to your downloads directory and extract the plugin binary

tar xvzf flashplayer10_2_p3_64bit_linux_111710.tar.gz

3. Create a directory for browser plugins in your users home directory

mkdir -p ~/.mozilla/plugins

4. Move extracted in step 2 Flash player plugin binary to its new location

mv libflashplayer.so ~/.mozilla/plugins

5. Close all browser windows and restart the browser.

6. In Firefox or Chrome go to about:plugins to verify that there’s Shockwave Flash plugin available

But let’s start from the beginning. I should say right away that we at HeiaHeia are using Ruby Enterprise Edition, so I didn’t have to apply patches to Ruby source code that Evan is talking about in his post. Before starting to analyse GC current usage it will be useful to read a brilliant overview of Ruby garbage collection by Joe Damato. It’ll help to understand what’s going to happen next. It is also useful to read REE documentation on garbage collector performance tuning.

And as before any optimisation it is good to get the reference metrics, so that you know you actually improved something by changing settings, and didn’t make it worse. In this case I measured:

To measure number of garbage collector calls per one page I used Scrap – a nice tool by Chris Heald. Chris also describes the tuning process in great detail, so I’m not going to repeat it – just go and read his blog.

To measure local test execution time I just ran rake test 5 times and took the average of all runs.

To measure application server CPU load and average response time I used NewRelic tool (free version should be enough to do the measurement).

When I first loaded feed page with Scrap enabled I saw 36 GC cycles, and Ruby spend 1.12s in GC cycles (these figures are from the development server, so response time is big). After playing a bit with the settings and monitoring GC cycles number and unused heap after each allocation with Scrap, I ended up with the same settings as Twitter uses in production:

export RUBY_HEAP_MIN_SLOTS=500000
export RUBY_HEAP_SLOTS_INCREMENT=250000
export RUBY_HEAP_SLOTS_GROWTH_FACTOR=1
export RUBY_GC_MALLOC_LIMIT=50000000

These settings reduced GC cycles number down to 7 (from 36), and Ruby spent now only 0.62s in GC instead of 1.12s when loading feed page (again, load times are bigger on our development server).

After introducing same settings on my local machine project tests took only 148s – down from 274 seconds before optimisation – a whopping 46% improvement.

We have multiple identical application servers, so I introduced the new settings only on one of the application servers, to compare the results on a live system (during low traffic hours). Here’s the picture from NewRelic:

Server        Instances        Apdex          Resp.time    Throughput    CPU          Memory
hh-app1     3 Instances         0.86      	407 ms       30 rpm      14 %	      349 MB
hh-app2     3 Instances         0.91   	        311 ms	     30 rpm       8 %	      413 MB

hh-app2 had optimised garbage collector. With the same throughput CPU load  was only 8% vs 14% with non-optimised GC. However that improvement came at a cost of increased memory consumption (413M vs 349M). However response time and lower CPU load proved to be a lot more important than memory consumption, so I rolled out the new settings on all production servers.

Making nginx utilise GC settings when spawning Passenger instances is easy, and is well described by Chris. Here are instructions that work nice with server and Nginx setup on Ubuntu as I described in earlier posts.

Create /usr/local/bin/ruby-with-env file (as a root) that will set GC settings in the environment and then launch Ruby:

#!/bin/bash
export RUBY_HEAP_MIN_SLOTS=1500000
export RUBY_HEAP_SLOTS_INCREMENT=500000
export RUBY_HEAP_SLOTS_GROWTH_FACTOR=1
export RUBY_GC_MALLOC_LIMIT=50000000
exec "/usr/local/bin/ruby" "$@"

sudo chmod a+x /usr/local/bin/ruby-with-env

passenger_ruby /usr/local/bin/ruby;

passenger_ruby /usr/local/bin/ruby-with-env;

GD Support         enabled
GD Version         bundled (2.0.34 compatible)
GIF Read Support   enabled
GIF Create Support enabled
PNG Support        enabled
WBMP Support       enabled
XBM Support        enabled

Making sure that JPEG libraries are installed

sudo aptitude install libjpeg libjpeg-dev

and reconfiguring PHP with –with-jpeg-dir flag (the rest of the compilation process remains the same as here)

./configure --enable-fastcgi --enable-fpm --with-mcrypt --with-zlib
--enable-mbstring --with-openssl --with-mysql --with-mysql-sock
--with-gd --without-sqlite --disable-pdo --with-jpeg-dir=/usr/lib

and then restarting nginx

sudo /etc/init.d/nginx restart

helped to solve the problem.

Even though there’s Ubuntu nginx package available (which works perfectly when you’re running PHP apps using FCGI), if you want to take into use Phusion Passenger, you’ll need to recompile Nginx from sources.

Instructions below were verified on Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid Lynx) Server Edition.

If you already have Nginx ubuntu package installed, uninstall it (NOTE! purge will delete all configuration files – so if you changed them – make a backup for future reference):

sudo aptitude purge nginx

Assuming you already have Rails stack installed, install Passenger gem:

sudo gem install passenger

At the time of this writing the latest version of Passenger is 2.2.11

Let’s check dependencies that Ubuntu nginx package has and install them before compilation:

aptitude show nginx | grep Depends

Depends: libc6 (>= 2.4), libpcre3 (>= 7.7), libssl0.9.8 (>= 0.9.8k-1), zlib1g

sudo apt-get install libc6 libpcre3 libssl0.9.8 zlib1g
sudo /usr/local/bin/passenger-install-nginx-module

sudo /usr/local/bin/passenger-make-enterprisey

sudo vim /etc/init.d/nginx

#! /bin/sh

### BEGIN INIT INFO
# Provides:          nginx
# Required-Start:    $local_fs $remote_fs $network $syslog
# Required-Stop:     $local_fs $remote_fs $network $syslog
# Default-Start:     2 3 4 5
# Default-Stop:      0 1 6
# Short-Description: starts the nginx web server
# Description:       starts nginx using start-stop-daemon
### END INIT INFO

PATH=/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/opt/nginx/sbin
DAEMON=/opt/nginx/sbin/nginx
NAME=nginx
DESC=nginx

test -x $DAEMON || exit 0

# Include nginx defaults if available
if [ -f /etc/default/nginx ] ; then
        . /etc/default/nginx
fi

set -e

. /lib/lsb/init-functions

test_nginx_config() {
  if nginx -t $DAEMON_OPTS
  then
    return 0
  else
    return $?
  fi
}

case "$1" in
  start)
        echo -n "Starting $DESC: "
        test_nginx_config
        start-stop-daemon --start --quiet --pidfile /var/run/$NAME.pid \
                --exec $DAEMON -- $DAEMON_OPTS || true
        echo "$NAME."
        ;;
  stop)
        echo -n "Stopping $DESC: "
        start-stop-daemon --stop --quiet --pidfile /var/run/$NAME.pid \
                --exec $DAEMON || true
        echo "$NAME."
        ;;
  restart|force-reload)
        echo -n "Restarting $DESC: "
        start-stop-daemon --stop --quiet --pidfile \
                /var/run/$NAME.pid --exec $DAEMON || true
        sleep 1
        test_nginx_config
        start-stop-daemon --start --quiet --pidfile \
                /var/run/$NAME.pid --exec $DAEMON -- $DAEMON_OPTS || true
        echo "$NAME."
        ;;
  reload)
        echo -n "Reloading $DESC configuration: "
        test_nginx_config
        start-stop-daemon --stop --signal HUP --quiet --pidfile /var/run/$NAME.pid \
            --exec $DAEMON || true
        echo "$NAME."
        ;;
  configtest)
        echo -n "Testing $DESC configuration: "
        if test_nginx_config
        then
          echo "$NAME."
        else
          exit $?
        fi
        ;;
  status)
        status_of_proc -p /var/run/$NAME.pid "$DAEMON" nginx && exit 0 || exit $?
        ;;
  *)
        echo "Usage: $NAME {start|stop|restart|reload|force-reload|status|configtest}" >&2
        exit 1
        ;;
esac

exit 0

sudo chmod +x /etc/init.d/nginx
sudo /usr/sbin/update-rc.d -f nginx defaults

user www-data;
worker_processes  4;

error_log  /opt/nginx/logs/error.log;
pid        /var/run/nginx.pid;

events {
    worker_connections  8192;
    use epoll;
}

http {
    passenger_root /usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/passenger-2.2.11;
    passenger_ruby /usr/local/bin/ruby;

    include       /opt/nginx/conf/mime.types;

    # set a default type for the rare situation that
    # nothing matches from the mimie-type include
    default_type application/octet-stream;

    # This log format is compatible with any tool like awstats
    # that can parse standard apache logs.
    log_format main '$remote_addr - $remote_user [$time_local] '
                    '"$request" $status $body_bytes_sent "$http_referer" '
                    '"$http_user_agent" "$http_x_forwarded_for"' ;

    access_log  /opt/nginx/logs/access.log;

    sendfile        on;
    tcp_nopush     on;

    keepalive_timeout  0;
    tcp_nodelay        on;

    gzip  on;
    gzip_disable "MSIE [1-6]\.(?!.*SV1)";
    gzip_http_version 1.0;
    gzip_comp_level 2;
    gzip_proxied any;
    gzip_types text/plain text/css application/x-javascript text/xml application/xml application/xml+rss text/javascript;

    include /opt/nginx/conf/sites-enabled/*;
}

sudo mkdir /opt/nginx/conf/sites-available
sudo mkdir /opt/nginx/conf/sites-enabled

sudo vim /opt/nginx/conf/sites-available/mysite.com

server {
        listen   80;
        server_name  www.mysite.com;

        access_log  /home/user/logs/www.mysite.com/access.log;
        root   /home/user/www.mysite.com/public;

        # serve static content directly
        location ~* \.(ico|jpg|gif|png|css|js|swf|html)$ {
          if (-f $request_filename) {
            expires max;
            break;
          }
        }

        passenger_enabled on;

        # deny access to .htaccess files, if Apache's document root
        # concurs with nginx's one
        #
        location ~ /\.ht {
          deny  all;
        }
}

sudo ln -s /opt/nginx/conf/sites-available/mysite.com /opt/nginx/conf/sites-enabled/mysite.com
sudo /etc/init.d/nginx restart

I have faced this problem and found a relatively simple and robust solution. Here’s how I did it on Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala) and 10.04 (Lucid Lynx) server edition.

Solution was to replace default FastCGI implementation with PHP-FPM (FastCGI Process Manager). PHP-FPM is not supported in PHP out of the box – so if you use PHP 5.2.*, you’ll need to apply a patch and recompile PHP, and if you’re using PHP 5.3.* (at least in 5.3.2 PHP-FPM is not yet in the core) – you’ll need to check out PHP-FPM from PHP SVN.

Let’s start with uninstalling default Ubuntu php packages:

sudo apt-get remove php5*

Now we need to install dependencies. Note, that Ubuntu comes with a new autoconf tool version, which is not compatible with PHP, that’s why for successful compilation you need to temporarily install autoconf2.13 package.

sudo apt-get install libcurl4-openssl-dev libmcrypt-dev libxml2-dev libpng-dev 
autoconf2.13 libevent-dev libltdl-dev

Download latest stable PHP 5.2.13, Suhosin patch, PHP-FPM patch

cd ~/tmp
wget http://pl2.php.net/get/php-5.2.13.tar.gz/from/pl.php.net/mirror
wget http://download.suhosin.org/suhosin-patch-5.2.13-0.9.7.patch.gz
wget http://php-fpm.org/downloads/php-5.2.13-fpm-0.5.13.diff.gz
tar xvzf php-5.2.13.tar.gz
gunzip suhosin-patch-5.2.13-0.9.7.patch.gz
gunzip php-5.2.13-fpm-0.5.13.diff.gz
cd php-5.2.13
patch -p 1 -i ../php-5.2.13-fpm-0.5.13.diff
patch -p 1 -i ../suhosin-patch-5.2.13-0.9.7.patch
./buildconf --force
./configure --enable-fastcgi --enable-fpm --with-mcrypt --with-zlib --enable-mbstring --with-openssl
--with-mysql --with-mysql-sock --with-gd --without-sqlite --disable-pdo
make
make test
sudo make install

Alternatively you can download latest stable PHP 5.3.2, Suhosin patch, apply PHP-FPM patch. Note, that not all PHP based projects and plugins work correctly with new PHP 5.3 – it is not backwards compatible with PHP 5.2. I had troubles at least with some Joomla plugins and ZenCart.

cd ~/tmp
http://fi.php.net/get/php-5.3.2.tar.gz/from/this/mirror
wget http://download.suhosin.org/suhosin-patch-5.3.2-0.9.9.1.patch.gz
tar xvzf php-5.3.2.tar.gz
gunzip suhosin-patch-5.3.2-0.9.9.1.patch.gz
cd php-5.3.2
patch -p 1 -i ../suhosin-patch-5.3.2-0.9.9.1.patch
svn co http://svn.php.net/repository/php/php-src/trunk/sapi/fpm sapi/fpm
./buildconf --force
./configure --enable-fastcgi --enable-fpm --with-mcrypt --with-zlib --enable-mbstring --with-openssl
--with-mysql --with-mysql-sock --with-gd --without-sqlite --disable-pdo --disable-reflection
make
make test
sudo make install

Uninstall autoconf2.13 after compilation.

sudo apt-get remove autoconf2.13

Change user and group of php-fpm processes to user and group of your choice (e.g. www-data and www-data) – lines 63 and 66

sudo vim /usr/local/etc/php-fpm.conf

Edit PHP settings

sudo vim /etc/php5/cgi/php.ini (in Ubuntu 9.xx)

sudo vim /etc/php5/apache2/php.ini (in Ubuntu 10.04)

Set:

max_execution_time = 30
memory_limit = 128M
error_reporting = E_COMPILE_ERROR|E_RECOVERABLE_ERROR|E_ERROR|E_CORE_ERROR
display_errors = Off
log_errors = On
error_log = /var/log/php.log
register_globals = Off

Now if you haven’t done so yet, install Nginx. Ubuntu 10.04 comes with the latest stable Nginx 0.7.65, so just do:

sudo apt-get install nginx

Now you can congifure your sites, e.g. for WordPress Nginx configuration can look like this:

server {
        listen   80;
        server_name  blog.mysite.com;

        access_log  /home/user/logs/blog.mysite.com/access.log;

        location / {
          root   /home/user/blog.mysite.com;
          index  index.php index.html index.htm;

          # this serves static files that exist without running other rewrite tests
          if (-f $request_filename) {
              expires 30d;
              break;
          }

          # this sends all non-existing file or directory requests to index.php
          if (!-e $request_filename) {
              rewrite ^(.+)$ /index.php?q=$1 last;
          }

        }

        # pass the PHP scripts to FastCGI server listening on 127.0.0.1:9000
        #
        location ~ \.php$ {
          include /etc/nginx/fastcgi_params;
          fastcgi_pass  127.0.0.1:9000;
          fastcgi_index index.php;
          fastcgi_param  SCRIPT_FILENAME  /home/user/blog.mysite.com/$fastcgi_script_name;
        }

        # deny access to .htaccess files, if Apache's document root
        # concurs with nginx's one
        #
        location ~ /\.ht {
          deny  all;
        }
}

Of course there’s always an option to use github. And if you’re working on an open source project, or want to concentrate on coding and not system administration, github is a lot better option than setting up and managing your own git server (I’ve been so impressed by @defunkt‘s presentation on #frozenrails, that started recommending github to everyone But if you already pay for a virtual machine somewhere (like Linode), then setting up your own git server might be a viable option, especially that it is sooo easy.

The following instructions have been verified on Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx, but should work at least on Ubuntu 9.04 and 9.10 just as well.

Let’s start with installing gitosis itself. Issue the following command on the server:

sudo apt-get install gitosis

This will create a new user ‘gitosis’ and prepare a structure for repositories in /srv/gitosis. Now let’s initialize a gitosis-admin repo – it is used for managing repositories and access rights.

sudo -H -u gitosis gitosis-init < ~/tmp/my_public.key

You need to have a public key for accessing it. If you don’t have one yet, you can use

ssh-keygen -t rsa

command on your local machine to generate public/private key pair. Copy public key to the server before initializing gitosis-admin repository.

Now with gitosis-admin repo initialized on the server – let’s clone it to the local computer.

git clone gitosis@myserver.com:gitosis-admin.git

If you see an error like:

Permission denied (publickey).
fatal: The remote end hung up unexpectedly

That is most likely because you restricted access to you server via ssh to only certain users, and gitosis is not one of them. Edit /etc/ssh/sshd_config, find AllowUsers line and add gitosis to the list.

Now that you have successfully cloned gitosis-admin repo to your local computer, you can add  new users and new repositories.

To add new repository, edit gitosis.conf and add lines like:

[group myrepo]
writable = myrepo
members = user@computer

After that commit and push the changes to gitosis-admin project:

git commit -a -m "Added myrepo repository"

Now you can clone this new repository to your local machine (note .git added to the name of the repository):

git clone gitosis@mygitserver.com:myrepo.git

To allow new user to access your repository, get this user’s public key, copy it to gitosis-admin/keydir as newuser@computer.pub, then edit gitosis.conf and add newuser@computer (without .pub) to the list of members:

[group myrepo]
writable = myrepo
members = user@computer newuser@computer

Now add new files and commit and push changes to git server (make sure you really add all files and don’t forget to push – these are quite common mistakes when adding new users).

git add .
git commit -m "Added user newuser"
git push

With a freshly cloned empty repository you’ll need to add you first files, do a commit and push origin master:

vim README.txt
git commit -a -m "Added readme"
git push origin master

Now you can git pull and git push as much as you like.

1. check available disk space to ensure that you still have some

$ df

Filesystem           1K-blocks      Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/xvda             33030016  10407780  22622236  32% /
tmpfs                   368748         0    368748   0% /lib/init/rw
varrun                  368748        56    368692   1% /var/run
varlock                 368748         0    368748   0% /var/lock
udev                    368748       108    368640   1% /dev
tmpfs                   368748         0    368748   0% /dev/shm

2. check available Inodes

$ df -i

Filesystem            Inodes   IUsed   IFree IUse% Mounted on
/dev/xvda            2080768 2080768       0  100% /
tmpfs                  92187       3   92184    1% /lib/init/rw
varrun                 92187      38   92149    1% /var/run
varlock                92187       4   92183    1% /var/lock
udev                   92187    4404   87783    5% /dev
tmpfs                  92187       1   92186    1% /dev/shm

3. find those little bastards

$ for i in /*; do echo $i; find $i |wc -l; done

This command will list directories and number of files in them. Once you see a directory with unusually high number of files (or command just hangs over calculation for a long time), repeat the command for that directory to see where exactly the small files are.

$ for i in /home/*; do echo $i; find $i |wc -l; done

4. once you found the suspect – just delete the files

$ sudo rm -rf /home/bad_user/directory_with_lots_of_empty_files

You’re done. Check the results with df -i command again. You should see something like this:

Filesystem            Inodes   IUsed   IFree IUse% Mounted on

/dev/xvda            2080768  284431 1796337   14% /
tmpfs                  92187       3   92184    1% /lib/init/rw
varrun                 92187      38   92149    1% /var/run
varlock                92187       4   92183    1% /var/lock
udev                   92187    4404   87783    5% /dev
tmpfs                  92187       1   92186    1% /dev/shm

- iPhone 3G 8Gb Sonera
- Ubuntu Linux 9.04 (Jaunty) on Lenovo T61 laptop, kernel 2.6.28-15
- VMware player 2.5.3
- guest OS: WinXP Home SP3 with iTunes 9.0.1.8

goal: upgrading firmware to 3.1.2

I used instructions on Menno Smits’ blog. Here’s the summary:

1. Create a file /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-usb

sudo vim /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-usb

2. Add usb modules not to be loaded into that file

blacklist snd_usb_audio
blacklist usbhid

I didn’t list ehci_hcd, and it still worked. By the way, USB HID stands for USB Human Interface Device, and blacklisting it might disable your USB mouse and keyboard as well. See a link in the end of the post how to work around it.

3. Unload blacklisted modules manually, in case if they have been loaded already

sudo /sbin/modprobe -r snd_usb_audio
sudo /sbin/modprobe -r usbhid

4. Reload kernel event manager for the changes to take effect

sudo /etc/init.t/udev reload

5. Restart VMware and make sure you also restart Windows in VMware (it took me seveal attempts to figure that this was the problem)

6. Now start iPhone software update in iTunes or “restore and update”, if you already tried without disabling usbhid and got your iPhone into recovery mode.

7. After update is complete, remove the blacklist file and restart kernel event manager again

sudo rm /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-usb
sudo /etc/init.t/udev reload

If iTunes in WMware do not see iPhone, make sure that it is connected in VMware removable devices menu. Note that during firmware update iPhone might get disconnected – just connect it again using VMware removable devices menu.

I tried to verify suggestion from Will to disable only iPhone in ubuntu, using its USB ID, but don’t actually know if it worked, because I didn’t restart Windows in WMware and restore and update failed. Here’s what I did:

- connected iPhone and checked its USB ID:

$ lsusb

Bus 002 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub
Bus 007 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Bus 006 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Bus 005 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Bus 001 Device 024: ID 05ac:1292 Apple, Inc.
Bus 001 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub
Bus 004 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Bus 003 Device 004: ID 0a5c:2110 Broadcom Corp. Bluetooth Controller
Bus 003 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub

- created a file /etc/modprobe.d/usbhid

sudo vim /etc/modprobe.d/usbhid

with the following content

options usbhid quirks=0×05ac:0×1292:0×04

where 0×1292 is the USB ID displayed by lsusb command, and 0×04 is the instruction to ignore device with specified USB ID.

- did everything as isteps 1-7 except that I didn’t blacklist usbhid and didn’t unload it manually.

It would be interesting to know if anyone succeeds with iPhone firmware update on Ubuntu without blacklisting usbhid module completely.

This proved to be a non-trivial task. There is a number of tutorials on the net, but none of them described the full solution. So after getting it all to work, I decided to share all the tips and tricks. Feel free to comment, if you will find problems with the following set of instructions.
SSH to redmine.mydomain.com as a user that will be running Redmine (in the following examples it will be ‘redmine_user’).
First, you need to compile openssl – it will be required for curl, git and redmine.

mkdir ~/tmp
cd ~/tmp
wget http://www.openssl.org/source/openssl-0.9.8k.tar.gz
tar xzvf openssl-0.9.8k.tar.gz
cd openssl-0.9.8k
./config shared zlib --prefix=$HOME/.packages
make
make install

Let’s tell the world that we keep binaries and libraries also in the local directory. Edit ~/.bashrc (it is used by all non-login shells):

export TZ='Europe/Helsinki'
export PATH="$HOME/.packages/bin:$PATH"
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH="$HOME/.packages/lib"
export GEM_HOME="$HOME/.gems"
export GEM_PATH="$GEM_HOME:/usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8"
export PATH="$HOME/.packages/bin:$HOME/.gems/bin:$PATH"
export RUBYLIB="$HOME/.packages/lib:$RUBYLIB"
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH="$HOME/.packages/lib"

# this ensures our gem install processes don't get killed by the DreamHost police
alias gem="nice -n19 ~/.packages/bin/gem"

(You can skip TZ – it is just usefule to have correct time set for your environment. Use tzselect to find out correct TZ string for your region)

And edit ~/.bash_profile (it is used by login shells):

umask 002
PS1='[\h:$PWD]$ '
alias ll="ls -l"
EDITOR="/usr/bin/vim"
. .bashrc

Now let’s apply the changes in active shell:

cd ~ : . .bash_profile

Then you need to compile curl, to be able to compile git with curl and execute clone commands on your server.

cd ~/tmp
wget http://curl.haxx.se/download/curl-7.19.5.tar.gz
tar xzvf curl-7.19.5.tar.gz
cd curl-7.19.5
./configure --prefix=$HOME/.packages --with-ssl=$HOME/.packages
make
make install

Now get and compile Git. If you are not using Dreamhost PS, you might want to compile it with NO_MMPAP=1, to reduce
probability of git process getting killed by Dreamhost police robots due to extensive memory

cd ~/tmp
wget http://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/git-1.6.4.tar.gz
tar xzvf git-1.6.4.tar.gz
cd git-1.6.4
./configure --prefix=$HOME/.packages --with-curl=$HOME/.packages
make
make install

Let’s start with ruby and rails related stuff. First readline library is needed, for script/console to work.

cd ~/tmp
wget http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/readline/readline-5.2.tar.gz
tar xzvf readline-5.2.tar.gz
cd readline-5.2
./configure --prefix=$HOME/.packages
make
make install

Install ruby:

cd ~/tmp
wget ftp://ftp.ruby-lang.org/pub/ruby/1.8/ruby-1.8.7-p72.tar.gz
tar zxvf ruby-1.8.7-p72.tar.gz
cd ruby-1.8.7-p72
./configure --prefix=$HOME/.packages --with-openssl-dir=$HOME/.packages --with-readline-dir=$HOME/.packages
make
make install

Install rubygems:

cd ~/tmp
wget http://rubyforge.org/frs/download.php/60718/rubygems-1.3.5.tgz
tar zxvf rubygems-1.3.5.tgz
cd rubygems-1.3.5
ruby setup.rb config --prefix=$HOME/.packages
ruby setup.rb setup
ruby setup.rb install

Now you can install all required gems and freeze them if necessary.

Installing RedMine

Refer to http://wiki.dreamhost.com/Redmine for details.

But there’s one trick – if you want RedMine to use just compiled version of Git – edit in lib/redmine/scm/adapters/git_adapter.rb:

# Git executable name
GIT_BIN = "/home/username/.packages/bin/git"

If this is not done, default Dreamhost git will be used (which is too old at the moment 1.4.4.4) and Git repository browsing will not work in RedMine
(see http://groups.google.com/group/phusion-passenger/browse_thread/thread/5080d7c7cfbcf20e).

Setting up Git repository

Refer to http://wiki.dreamhost.com/Git for details.

Couple of tricks here. There are bugs in WebDAV functionality in Ubuntu – so if you’re using it – launch Nautilus, use “File->Connect to server…” menu from there (not from the system menu), don’t enter user name in the dialog – leave it empty and enter it when you’re requested username and password in the next dialog.

When setting up WebDAV access rights, give access to user “redmine”.

Setting Git repository copy for Redmine

Create ~/.netrc for your redmine user on Dreamhost

Insert the following line in that file

machine git.mydomain.com login redmine password [redmine_password]

where redmine_password is the password you gave to user redmine in the previous step.
.netrc will ensure that password is not asked when git is accessing the repository.
You don’t need to bother about creating .netrc if you have a public repository (or at least available for cloning without password).

Create a local copy of the repository

For RedMine to be able to display Git repository, it needs to have a local clone of the repository.

mkdir ~/git_project_clones
cd git_project_clones
git clone http://git.mydomain.com/repository_name

Now you should have a local copy that can be used from RedMine.
All you have left to do is to set up regular pulls from the master repository to this local copy. Use command

crontab -e

Add the following line to pull latest change into local copy every 5 minutes:

*/5 * * * * cd /home/redmine_user/git_project_clones/repository_name && /home/redmine_user/.packages/bin/git pull

Make sure that you specify full path to git – otherwise it will execute Dreamhost default git 1.4.4.4 and command will fail with “refusing to create funny ref ‘remotes/origin/*’ locally” error.

Save and exit cron editor.

(You might also want to check Redmine own wiki: http://www.redmine.org/wiki/redmine/HowTo_keep_in_sync_your_git_repository_for_redmine)

Set repository in the settings of your project in RedMine: /home/redmine_user/git_project_clones/repository_name/.git

Now you need to manually update Git repository changesets in RedMine:

cd ~/mydomain.com
script/runner "Repository.fetch_changesets" -e production

And set a hook to your repository to do this every time repository is updated – edit ~/git_project_clones/repository_name/.git/hooks/post-update file and add the following command ther:

cd /home/redmine_user/mydomain.com && script/runner "Repository.fetch_changesets" -e production

When writing this blogpost I found a lot of useful information on Dreamhost own wiki as well on these blog posts:
http://www.wavethenavel.com/2008/09/08/bootstrapping-a-dreamhost-account-for-rails-and-git/
http://juliobiason.net/2008/05/19/git-repositories-on-dreamhost-via-ssh/
http://www.simonecarletti.com/blog/2009/07/configuring-git-repository-with-redmine/