GoDaddy Rollin’ on Rails

So I broke down and decided to run one of my beta apps on GoDaddy’s new Rails account.  I was extremely pleased to see that GoDaddy offers Rails hosting, but it turns out there’s a lot to be done from a configuration standpoint.

On the GoDaddy site it mentions they use FastCGI, but when I looked through their .htaccess files references are made to dispatch.cgi instead of dispatch.fcgi.  Another issue is the path to the Ruby binary.  On my Mac, the binary lives at /usr/bin/ruby while on GoDaddy’s servers it’s located at /usr/local/bin/ruby.  I found this through trial and error, which cost me about an hour.  Maybe they should consider documenting that somewhere.
The other problem that I’m currently trying to resolve is the configuration to get incoming requests routed to my controllers.  Right now I can access the index.html page located in the public directory, but any requests made to my controllers end up failing.  I’ve been working with GoDaddy for about three days now and am growing frustrated.

I will post the ultimate results of my findings once I (or they) can get the issue resolved.  I’ve wasted a tremendous amount of time on what should be a somewhat trivial task.  The worst part is that their help docs make it sound so easy.  I’m wondering how many Rails applications have been deployed on their servers because everyone has to running into this brick wall.

Hopefully I can get to the bottom of the issue and prevent others from wasting as much time as I have so far.  It appears that switching from WEBrick to FastCGI is more difficult than I originally expected.

2 Responses to “GoDaddy Rollin’ on Rails”

1. Andrew says:

   July 20, 2006 at 12:32 pm

   After hours on the phone with Go Daddy!, I’m having a similar problem that you ran into. Maybe you can help.

   “…but any requests made to my controllers end up failing.”

   How did you resolve this specific problem? I have a controller named ’search’ (no quotes), and when I enter the domain name/search, I get a “page not found” error. This is extermely frustrating. Any help would be great.

   Thanks,
   Andrew
2. dennis says:

   July 22, 2006 at 10:48 pm

   Please refer to this link (http://www.db75.com/new_blog/?p=237) and see if it offers any help.