Running Merb on JRuby 1.2 and Glassfish 2.1

30 March 2009 By Carl Mercier 7 In Ruby, Technology

So I’ve been trying to get Merb running on JRuby a good part of last night. I don’t know jack about Java, so this has been a little bit more challenging than it should have been. Most (if not all) of the tutorials I found were old and obsolete, so I decided to throw out my very own.

I need to give credit to this page, without which I’d still be fighting with this whole thing.

This tutorial uses JRuby 1.2, Glassfish 2.1, Merb 1.0.10 and Ubuntu 8.04 LTS. To make my life easy, I simply fired an EC2 instance based on ami-71fd1a18. I recommend you do the same. However, it should work from just any vanilla Ubuntu 8.04.

Some important comments are in the script below, make sure to read them. Enjoy!

# Setup the scene
apt-get update
apt-get upgrade
# this is the Corporate World, folks, you'll need to accept some license agreement in the next step
apt-get install -y vim-full build-essential git-core sun-java6-jdk ant
apt-get install -y mysql-server mysql-client

# Install JRuby
cd /tmp
wget http://dist.codehaus.org/jruby/1.2.0/jruby-bin-1.2.0.tar.gz
tar xzvf jruby-bin*
mv jruby-1.2.0 /opt/jruby
echo "export PATH="/opt/jruby/bin:$PATH"" >> ~/.bashrc
export PATH="/opt/jruby/bin:$PATH"

# By now, 'jirb' should start IRB on JRuby!

# Let's now install some gems
jruby -S gem install erubis rake json_pure rspec rack mime-types rubigen --no-rdoc --no-ri
jruby -S gem install hpricot --no-rdoc --no-ri --version '~>0.6.1' # version 7 doesn't work with JRuby as of now
jruby -S gem install merb-core merb-more --no-rdoc --no-ri

# Test to see if Merb is installed:
jruby -S merb help

# Create an Hello World app
cd ~
jruby -S merb-gen core hello_world
cd hello_world
jruby -S merb-gen controller hello
echo "<h1>This is a Merb app running on JRuby. w00t!</h1>" > app/views/hello/index.html.erb
# Freeze Merb into your app
jruby -S gem install merb-core merb-more --no-rdoc --no-ri -i gems

# Install Glassfish
cd /tmp
wget http://java.net/download/javaee5/v2.1_branch/promoted/Linux/glassfish-installer-v2.1-b60e-linux.jar
# and yet more licensing!
java -Xmx256m -jar glassfish-installer-v2.1-b60e-linux.jar
mv glassfish /opt/
cd /opt/glassfish
ant -f setup.xml

# Start Glassfish server, it might take some time.
./bin/asadmin start-domain domain1

# Warbler and friends
jruby -S gem install rails warbler activerecord-jdbc-adapter --no-rdoc --no-ri
cd ~/hello_world
jruby -S warble config

# Make sure frozen gems are included in your .war file.
# edit config/warble.rb and add "gems" to the config.dirs line

# create some missing directories, otherwise, warble will complain.
mkdir -p lib log vendor
# create a .war file
jruby -S warble war
# copy it to Glassfish.
cp hello_world.war /opt/glassfish/domains/domain1/autodeploy/

# Glassfish finds your app and starts it automatically.  Give it a few seconds.
# Then, go to http://{server-ip}:4848
# User: admin    Pass: adminadmin        Sounds like a good idea to change this for production!!!!!
# Click "Web Applications", then "hello_world".  Change "Context Root" to "/" and Save.  Saving was slow for me.

#
# That's it!!!
#
# Now go see your l33t web 2.0 app in action:
# Go to http://{server-ip}:8080/
# and http://{server-ip}:8080/hello

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deployment, glassfish, java, jruby, merb, rails, ruby, rubyonrails

7 Comments on "Running Merb on JRuby 1.2 and Glassfish 2.1"

Arun Gupta
30/03/2009 at 9:56 pm Permalink

Thanks for the wonderful blog entry!

Alternatively Merb applications can run using the GlassFish Gem as described at:

http://blogs.sun.com/arungupta/entry/getting_started_with_merb_using

and

http://blogs.sun.com/arungupta/entry/totd_53_scaffold_in_merb
Carl Mercier
30/03/2009 at 10:01 pm Permalink

Arun,

That’s some pretty nifty stuff that you have there, thanks!
Arun Gupta
30/03/2009 at 10:17 pm Permalink

Thanks, feel free to use it in any manner!

How do you plan to use GlassFish and Merb together ?
Carl Mercier
30/03/2009 at 10:22 pm Permalink

We don’t have any real plans yet, but we’re considering moving Defensio to JRuby for the real threads. Datamapper is a show stopper for us right now though. So this is still just a big experiment. Still good to play with technology and know what your options are imo!
Arun Gupta
30/03/2009 at 10:27 pm Permalink

Ok, thanks!

Feel free to give your GlassFish related feedback at users@glassfish.dev.java.net or JRuby feedback at user@jruby.codehaus.org. Or post a comment on my blog

I got bunch of Merb related entries at: http://blogs.sun.com/arungupta/tags/merb
grantmichaels
30/03/2009 at 10:54 pm Permalink

while you might end up needing some of what you discovered when you actually deploy, but +1 using glassfish v3 gem for development … you just type glassfish from the base directory of the rack app and well, that’s it …
marek
21/05/2009 at 8:13 am Permalink

I’m not linux advanced user and I get that error when following instructions from article.

marek@marek-desktop:~$ jruby -S merb help
jruby: No such file, directory, or command — merb

marek@marek-desktop:~$ jruby -S rails hello_app
:1: /usr/bin/rails:4: , unexpected ‘=’ (SyntaxError)

marek@marek-desktop:~$ which gem
/opt/jruby/bin/gem

marek@marek-desktop:~$ gem environment
RubyGems Environment:
– RUBYGEMS VERSION: 1.3.1
– RUBY VERSION: 1.8.6 (2009-03-16 patchlevel 287) [java]
– INSTALLATION DIRECTORY: /var/lib/gems/1.8
– RUBY EXECUTABLE: /opt/jruby/bin/jruby
– EXECUTABLE DIRECTORY: /var/lib/gems/1.8/bin
– RUBYGEMS PLATFORMS:
– ruby
– universal-java-1.6
– GEM PATHS:
– /var/lib/gems/1.8
– /home/marek/.gem/jruby/1.8
– /opt/jruby/lib/ruby/gems/1.8
– GEM CONFIGURATION:
– :update_sources => true
– :verbose => true
– :benchmark => false
– :backtrace => false
– :bulk_threshold => 1000
– “install” => “–env-shebang”
– “update” => “–env-shebang”
– :sources => ["http://gems.rubyforge.org/", "http://gems.github.com/", "http://gems.github.com"]
– REMOTE SOURCES:
– http://gems.rubyforge.org/
– http://gems.github.com/
– http://gems.github.com

Any idea what could I do ?