image_science and deployment

We just poked around to get IS deployed on an apache/fcgi setup. Two things go wrong in the usual configuration.

1. apache is running the process but HOME wasn't set so we had to set INLINEDIR.
2. INLINEDIR was initally set to /home/limespot but apache can't write to that dir.
3. In order to fix that, we set INLINEDIR to /home/limespot/inline and made that dir owned by apache:apache.
4. Oddly, we got another error after that, as ld wasn't found. I think the error message was wrong. cc shouldn't be runnable if ld isn't runnable. We fixed that by setting up a minimal PATH.

In all, here were our conf tweaks:

  DefaultInitEnv INLINEDIR /home/limespot/inline
  DefaultInitEnv PATH      /usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin

and our shell tweaks:

  % rm -rf ~limespot/.ruby_inline
  % mkdir ~limespot/inline
  % chown apache:apache !$

EDIT: on second thought, the INLINEDIR should go in config/environments/production.rb, probably the PATH too, but I don't understand why that one occured yet.

ADDED 2007-08-28: INLINEDIR in production.rb is the way to go for mongrel setups.