Running Merb on JRuby 1.2 and Glassfish 2.1 : Carl Mercier's blog

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

7 Responses to “Running Merb on JRuby 1.2 and Glassfish 2.1”

Arun Gupta says:

March 30, 2009 at 9:56 pm

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 says:

March 30, 2009 at 10:01 pm

Arun,

That’s some pretty nifty stuff that you have there, thanks!
Arun Gupta says:

March 30, 2009 at 10:17 pm

Thanks, feel free to use it in any manner!

How do you plan to use GlassFish and Merb together ?
Carl Mercier says:

March 30, 2009 at 10:22 pm

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 says:

March 30, 2009 at 10:27 pm

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 says:

March 30, 2009 at 10:54 pm

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 says:

May 21, 2009 at 8:13 am

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 ?

Carl Mercier's blog

Running Merb on JRuby 1.2 and Glassfish 2.1

by Carl Mercier

7 Responses to “Running Merb on JRuby 1.2 and Glassfish 2.1”

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