Installing SEEK in a production environment
This page contains some extra notes about setting up SEEK for production (i.e. for real use rather than for development).
By reading and following these extra notes, you will more performance out of SEEK, and reduce the ongoing maintenance.
If you wish to run under a sub URI, e.g. example.com/seek, then please read and follow Installing under a sub URI at the end of the installation.
Before you install SEEK
This will make sure some of the rake tasks affect the appropriate database.
To save time later there are also some additional packages to install:
sudo apt-get install libapr1-dev libaprutil1-dev
You will need to install SEEK as the www-data user. First, to make the installation simpler, give this user a dedicated home directory:
sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 stop
sudo usermod -d /home/www-data www-data
sudo usermod -s /bin/bash www-data
sudo mkdir /home/www-data
sudo chown www-data /home/www-data
sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 start
We recommend installing SEEK in /srv/rails/seek - first you need to create this and grant permissions to www-data
sudo mkdir -p /srv/rails
sudo chown www-data /srv/rails
Now switch to the www-data user
sudo su - www-data
cd /srv/rails
Before following the standard INSTALL guide you need to set an environment variable to indicate that you intend to setup and run SEEK as production.
export RAILS_ENV=production
you will need to reset this variable if you close your shell and start a new session
You can now follow the overall Installation Guide, and then return to this page for some additional steps to get SEEK running together with Apache, and also automating the required services.
If you have problems with requiring a sudo password during the RVM steps - first setup RVM and ruby-1.9.3 as a user with sudo access, and repeat the steps as the www-data user. This means the required packages should then be installed. At the time of writing this guide this shouldn’t be necessary.
After you have installed SEEK
Compiling Assets
Assets - such as images, javascript and stylesheets, need to be precompiled - which means minifying them, grouping some together into a single file, and compressing. These then get placed into public/assets. To compile them run the following command. This can take some time, so be patient
bundle exec rake assets:precompile
Serving SEEK through Apache
First you need to setup Passenger Phusion .Still as the www-data user, run the command:
bundle exec passenger-install-apache2-module
This will compile a module for Apache, and at the end present you with some lines that need adding to /etc/apache2/apache2.conf. These will look something like the following, but the paths will most likely be different:
LoadModule passenger_module /home/www-data/.rvm/gems/ruby-2.2.7/gems/passenger-5.1.2/buildout/apache2/mod_passenger.so
<IfModule mod_passenger.c>
PassengerRoot /home/www-data/.rvm/gems/ruby-2.2.7/gems/passenger-5.1.2
PassengerDefaultRuby /home/www-data/.rvm/gems/ruby-2.2.7/wrappers/ruby
</IfModule>
You will need to be a user that has sudo permissions, and edit this file:
sudo nano /etc/apache2/apache2.conf
Now create a virtual host definition for SEEK:
sudo nano /etc/apache2/sites-available/seek.conf
which looks like (if you have registered a DNS for your site, then set ServerName appropriately):
<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerName www.yourhost.com
DocumentRoot /srv/rails/seek/public
<Directory /srv/rails/seek/public>
# This relaxes Apache security settings.
Allow from all
# MultiViews must be turned off.
Options -MultiViews
Require all granted
</Directory>
<LocationMatch "^/assets/.*$">
Header unset ETag
FileETag None
# RFC says only cache for 1 year
ExpiresActive On
ExpiresDefault "access plus 1 year"
</LocationMatch>
</VirtualHost>
The LocationMatch block tells Apache to serve up the assets (images, CSS, Javascript) with a long expiry time, leading to better performance since these items will be cached. You may need to enable the headers and expires modules for Apache, so run:
sudo a2enmod headers
sudo a2enmod expires
Now enable the SEEK site, and disable the default that is installed with Apache, and restart:
sudo a2ensite seek
sudo a2dissite 000-default
sudo service apache2 restart
If you now visit http://localhost (note there is no 3000 port) - you should see SEEK.
If you wish to restart SEEK, maybe after an upgrade, without restarting Apache you can do so by running (as www-data)
touch /srv/rails/seek/tmp/restart.txt
Configuring for HTTPS
We would strongly recommend using Lets Encrypt for free SSL certificates.
Setting up the services
The following steps show how to setup delayed_job and soffice to run as a service, and automatically start and shutdown when you restart the server. Apache Solr should already be setup from following the Setting up Solr instructions.
Delayed Job Background Service
Create the file /etc/init.d/delayed_job-seek and copy the contents of scripts/delayed_job-seek into it.
The run:
sudo chmod +x /etc/init.d/delayed_job-seek
sudo update-rc.d delayed_job-seek defaults
start it up with:
sudo /etc/init.d/delayed_job-seek start
The LibreOffice Soffice service
Create the file /etc/init.d/soffice and copy the contents of scripts/soffice into it.
The run:
sudo chmod +x /etc/init.d/soffice
sudo update-rc.d soffice defaults
start it up with:
sudo /etc/init.d/soffice start