Ruby on Rails on FreeBSD
I decided to move back to FreeBSD after 2 years of running NixOS. One thing I appreciate on Linux is the ability to easily install Ruby on Rails framework. It’s a framework of my choice for creating web applications, so naturally I was curious to see how Ruby will work on FreeBSD too. My hobby application is using Rails 8 and Postgres, so nothing too fancy. Let’s deep dive into how it all went!
Ruby, Rails and gems Link to heading
Current version of Ruby on FreeBSD quarterly branch is 3.2, which means that all gems are compiled against this version. It is possible to switch to latest branch in order to get Ruby 3.4, which is a good news. In order to do that, create a new file called file: /usr/local/etc/pkg/repos/FreeBSD.conf with this content:
FreeBSD {
url = "pkg+http://pkg.freebsd.org/\${ABI}/latest";
}
Before moving on, it’s a good idea to create a new boot environment using bectl create <snapshot>. I haven’t done that though as I had new installation on my laptop and therefore I had nothing to lose. The next step is to update the packages to the latest branch by pkg upgrade -f.
With that done, we can now install following packages:
ruby34
rubygems-gem
As I said before, Ruby gems are compiled against Ruby 3.2, so it will pull this dependency and will expose it as /usr/local/bin/ruby. In order to override that, we are going to change our PATH variable (line #2). By default Ruby gems installs into system directory, which will fail unless installed by root. I don’t believe that it’s a good idea, so I override the home location of gems (line #1) by setting different GEM_HOME variable. The last line is important for Cuprite gem to find correctly the browser I use for system testing.
All the following lines belongs to .zshrc:
export GEM_HOME=$(/usr/local/bin/ruby34 -e 'puts Gem.user_dir') # (1)
export PATH="$HOME/bin:$PATH:$GEM_HOME/bin" # (2)
export BROWSER_PATH="/usr/local/bin/ungoogled-chromium" # (3)
Feel free to choose whatever browser you please, of course. With that, we have everything done on Ruby side, so let’s take a look at the database!
Postgres Database Link to heading
One reason to move back to FreeBSD was to use jail for database installation. I described how I create jails in one of my previous blog posts. With having the jail ready and being able to access internet, it’s time to install Postgres 17 into it by running pkg -j postgres install postgres17-server. Notice how I can specify the jail without having to log into it and run the command there using ancient sh shell, what a joy!
Let’s follow the install notes, enable the service (#1), initialize the database (#2) and start the service (#3):
service -j postgres postgresql enable # (1)
service -j postgres postgresql initdb # (2)
service -j postgres postgresql start # (3)
I changed the IP address Postgres listens on by setting listen_address = 172.16.0.10 in /var/db/postgres/data17/postgresql.conf inside the jail. I also allowed the traffic from my laptop into Postgres by adjusting /var/db/postgres/data17/pg_hba.conf by adding the following line:
host all all 172.16.0.1/12 trust
Again, feel free to pick whatever IP address you fancy for your jails. Don’t forget to restart the service.
The last step is to create 2 databases for my Rails app. This needs to be executed inside the jail:
doas jexec postgres createuser --superuser myapp_development
doas jexec postgres createuser --superuser myapp_test
doas jexec postgres createdb myapp_development
doas jexec postgres createdb myapp_test
I could also run these commands as SQL commands, set the passwords, etc. But since this is for local development only, I couldn’t be bothered. Also, if you thing I called the app myapp I must disappoint you, I’m just paranoid to not call it the real name here :-)
Done! Link to heading
And that’s it! Now I can install gems, create and migrate the database and start hacking my app!