NOTE: this is a draft document, just because there are some things here that
I'd really like to improve. Please let me know if you have a better way to do
these things. There's also a few issues with Puppet Dashboard that appear to
be bugs that need either improved documentation or changes to their source RPM
to fix. I'd love to see better ways to fix this.
I am attempting to document how one can take an EL5 system (like CentOS 5.x) to
Ruby 1.8.7 and meets the minimum requirements for Puppet Dashboard. There are
many reasons for this:
1. PuppetLabs blames many server-side issues on Ruby 1.8.5's known memory
problems. They have indicated that only Ruby 1.8.7 is supportable.
2. Dashboard requires Ruby 1.8.7
3. Foreman requires Ruby 1.8.7
Requirements:
EL5 system with rpmbuild utilities and ~/rpmbuild structure set up as
documented nearly everywhere. If you use different paths, adjust as necessary
for the remainder of the document.
Step 1: Upgrade Ruby
I have seen recommendations for Koran's Ruby build, but it didn't build on a
fairly stock EL5 system, and included a bunch of unrelated-to-puppet Tk and JP
patches. I found a much simpler spec file that appears to build properly on
EL5 that uses a significantly higher patch level of Ruby, fixes the autoconf
problems. It was trivial to review the few patches on this.
wget http://rbel.frameos.org/stable/el5/SRPMS/ruby-1.8.7.352-5.el5.src.rpm
rpm -i ruby-1.8.7.352-5.el5.src.rpm
rpmbuild -ba ~/rpmbuild/SPECS/ruby.spec
For any of the nodes, you need only put this RPM in your repository and have
Puppet upgrade them. It just works ;-)
For the passenger server, you'll need to get the source RPM from stealth
monkeys. You don't need to change anything at all -- just build the SRC rpm
and it will adjust everything to use Ruby 1.8.7. Very simple.
wget
http://passenger.stealthymonkeys.com/SRPMS/rubygem-passenger-3.0.11-1.src.rpm
rpm -i rubygem-passenger-3.0.11-1.src.rpm
rpmbuild -ba ~/rpmbuild/SPECS/passenger.spec
Step 2: Dashboard Requirements
First you need to get the mysql drivers for Ruby. The EPEL version binds
against ruby 1.8.5, but you can compile their source RPM on your ruby-1.8.7
system and it will work great.
wget ${EPEL_MIRROR_OF_CHOICE}/5/SRPMS/ruby-mysql-2.7.3-1.el5.src.rpm
rpm -i ruby-mysql-2.7.3-1.el5.src.rpm
rpmbuild -ba ~/rpmbuild/SPECS/ruby-mysql.spec
Next thing is that Puppet Dashboard requires a newer version of Ruby Gems, but
it doesn't tell you this. Instead it just barfs weird error messages. They
need to rewrite their Rakefile to explicitly define the minimum versions.
Thankfully, upgrading gems is very easy.
wget http://rbel.frameos.org/stable/el5/SRPMS/rubygems-1.8.10-1.el5.src.rpm
rpm -i rubygems-1.8.10-1.el5.src.rpm
rpmbuild -ba ~/rpmbuild/SPECS/rubygems.spec
Unfortunately, I never found a simple way to build RPMs for the three gems you
need. I'd like to fix this next part of the HOWTO in the near future. For
now, the easiest way to get the minimum requirements installed is to run the
following commands.
gem install rake
gem install rdoc
gem install rack -v 1.1.2
You'll observe that we installed a very specific version of Rack. The reason
for this is that Puppet Dashboard includes rack 1.1.2 within the package, but
the default Rakefile doesn't load it -- so it wants you to have Rack in your
normal gems library too. However if the version doesn't match the same version
included in the frozen vendor directory, it complains about that and barfs. I
consider this a bug in the dashboard packaging:
https://projects.puppetlabs.com/issues/11669
However, if you install 1.1.2 and nothing newer, it will work just fine.
Step 3: Install Dashboard
For unknown reasons to me, the source RPM for dashboard can't be extracted on
EL5 unless you pass --nomd5 --nosignature. The good news is that the source
RPM for EL6 compiles without any changes on EL5.
wget
http://yum.puppetlabs.com/el/6/products/SRPMS/puppet-dashboard-1.2.4-1.el6.src.rpm
rpm --nomd5 --nosignature -i puppet-dashboard-1.2.4-1.el6.src.rpm
rpmbuild -ba rpmbuild/SPECS/puppet-dashboard.spec
That's it! You now have puppet dashboard installed with all dependancies. You
can then follow the standard documentation from puppet labs at
http://docs.puppetlabs.com/guides/installing_dashboard.html#installation
Skip the first two #1 bullets and the first #2 bullet and start with the second
#2.
One problem I found was that when I tried to run it under Passenger/Apache, I
was told that it couldn't read the config.ru file. I had to do the following
to fix this:
cd /usr/share/puppet-dashboard
ln ./vendor/rails/railties/dispatches/config.ru config.ru
This is already tracked in https://projects.puppetlabs.com/users/3472
This is working great for me right now. Let me know if you have any ideas for
streamlining this process.
--
Jo Rhett
Net Consonance : consonant endings by net philanthropy, open source and other
randomness
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