Tips for Running Rails in Web Root on Bluehost

This took me way too long to figure out, but I finally got it.  It’s not the most desirable solution and I’m currently looking into alternate approaches.  Bluehost has a great howto for running Rails with a subdomain ie (app.domain.com), but I wasn’t able to find anything about running Rails in the web root.  With Bluehost your document root actually lives in the public_html folder.  Now the trick is to remove or rename public_html and then create a symbolic link:

ln -s /home/domain/railsapp/public public_html

This should do the trick and all incoming requests will be routed to the necessary controllers.  I was fairly excited to get this working since I’ve spent a tremendous amount of time trying to get Rails running in my web root.

2 Responses to “Tips for Running Rails in Web Root on Bluehost”

1. G. Miller says:

   September 19, 2006 at 5:22 pm

   Hi Dennis,

   First off, great job all around. You’re documentation has been an enormous help! I’m really struggling with GoDaddy and your site is about the only place I’ve gotten correct answers. I was hoping you could contact me so I could ask you a few questions that extend well beyond the scope of posting here. In an attempt to give this post some semblance of on-topic-ness: what are your thoughts on Bluehost? I’m finding myself quite unhappy with my current hosting.

   Thanks.
2. dennis baldwin says:

   September 26, 2006 at 10:19 pm

   No problem at all. Please feel free to contact me with any questions at dennisbaldwin at gmail.