Nginx Proxied to Unicorn¶ ↑

Nginx and Unicorn combine to provide a very powerful setup for deploying your Sinatra applications. This guide will show you how to effectively setup this combination for deployment.

Installation¶ ↑

First thing you will need to do is get nginx installed on your system. This should be handled by your operating systems package manager.

For more information on installing nginx, check the official docs.

Once you have nginx installed, you can install unicorn with rubygems:

gem install unicorn

Now that’s done we can setup a basic Rack application in Sinatra.

The Example Application¶ ↑

To start our example application, let’s first create a config.ru in our application root.

require "rubygems"
require "sinatra"

require File.expand_path '../myapp.rb', __FILE__

run MyApp

Let’s now use the myapp.rb that we specified in our Rack config file as our Sinatra application.

require "rubygems"
require "sinatra/base"

class MyApp < Sinatra::Base

  get '/' do
    'Hello, nginx and unicorn!'
  end

end

Now that we have our application in place, let’s get on to configuring our proxy.

Configuration¶ ↑

So if you’ve made it this far you should have a Sinatra application ready with nginx and unicorn installed. You're ready to move on to configuring the web server.

Unicorn

Configuring unicorn is really easy and provides an easy to use Ruby DSL for doing so. In our application's root we'll first need to make a couple directories, if you haven't already:

mkdir tmp
mkdir tmp/sockets
mkdir tmp/pids
mkdir log

Once those are in place, we’re ready to setup our unicorn.rb configuration.

# set path to app that will be used to configure unicorn, 
# note the trailing slash in this example
@dir = "/path/to/app/"

worker_processes 2
working_directory @dir

timeout 30

# Specify path to socket unicorn listens to, 
# we will use this in our nginx.conf later
listen "#{@dir}tmp/sockets/unicorn.sock", :backlog => 64

# Set process id path
pid "#{@dir}tmp/pids/unicorn.pid"

# Set log file paths
stderr_path "#{@dir}log/unicorn.stderr.log"
stdout_path "#{@dir}log/unicorn.stdout.log"

As you can see, unicorn is extremely simple to setup. Let’s move onto nginx now, soon enough you'll be well on your way to serving up all kinds of great Rack applications!

nginx

Nginx is a little more difficult to configure than unicorn, but still a fairly straightforward process.

In this example we’ll be putting all of our configuration in the nginx.conf file of our nginx installation. You could alternatively separate some of the configuration out into sites-enabled and other nginx conventions. However, for most common and simple implementations this guide should do the trick.

# this sets the user nginx will run as, 
#and the number of worker processes
user nobody nogroup;
worker_processes  1;

# setup where nginx will log errors to 
# and where the nginx process id resides
error_log  /var/log/nginx/error.log;
pid        /var/run/nginx.pid;

events {
  worker_connections  1024;
  # set to on if you have more than 1 worker_processes 
  accept_mutex off;
}

http {
  include       /etc/nginx/mime.types;

  default_type application/octet-stream;
  access_log /tmp/nginx.access.log combined;
 
  # use the kernel sendfile
  sendfile        on;
  # prepend http headers before sendfile() 
  tcp_nopush     on;

  keepalive_timeout  5;
  tcp_nodelay        on;

  gzip  on;
  gzip_vary on;
  gzip_min_length 500;
  
  gzip_disable "MSIE [1-6]\.(?!.*SV1)";
  gzip_types text/plain text/xml text/css
     text/comma-separated-values
     text/javascript application/x-javascript
     application/atom+xml image/x-icon;

  # use the socket we configured in our unicorn.rb
  upstream unicorn_server {
    server unix:/path/to/app/tmp/sockets/unicorn.sock
        fail_timeout=0;
  }

  # configure the virtual host
  server {
    # replace with your domain name
    server_name my-sinatra-app.com;
    # replace this with your static Sinatra app files, root + public 
    root /path/to/app/public;
    # port to listen for requests on
    listen 80;
    # maximum accepted body size of client request 
    client_max_body_size 4G;
    # the server will close connections after this time 
    keepalive_timeout 5;

    location / {
      try_files $uri @app;
    }

    location @app {
      proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
      proxy_set_header Host $http_host;
      proxy_redirect off;
      # pass to the upstream unicorn server mentioned above 
      proxy_pass http://unicorn_server;
    }
  }
}

Once you replace path/to/app with the location to your Sinatra application, you should be able now start your application and web server.

Starting the server¶ ↑

First thing you will need to do is boot up the unicorn processes:

unicorn -c path/to/unicorn.rb -E development -D -l 0.0.0.0:3001

It’s important to note the flags here, -c is path to your unicorn configuration. -E is the Rack environment for your application to run under. -D will daemonize the process, and -l is the address which unicorn will listen to.

Lastly, let’s start up nginx. On most debian-based systems you can use the following command:

/etc/init.d/nginx start

However, you should check with your distribution as to where the nginx daemon resides.

Now you should have successfully deployed your Sinatra application on nginx and unicorn.

Stopping the server¶ ↑

So now that you’re using nginx and unicorn, at some point you might end up asking yourself: How do I stop this thing?

Here’s how:

$ ps -ax | grep unicorn

This will output the processes running unicorn, in the first column should be the process id (pid). In order to stop unicorn in it's tracks:

kill -9 <PID>

There should be a master process which once that is killed, the workers should follow. Feel free to search the processes again to make sure they've all stopped before restarting.

To stop nginx you can use a similar technique as above, or if you’ve got the nginx init scripts installed on any debian-based system use:

sudo /etc/init.d/nginx stop

That should wrap things up for deploying nginx and unicorn, for more information on stopping the server look into man ps and man kill.

Resources¶ ↑

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