Dreamhost With Jekyll (and moodle)

#Dreamhost With Jekyll (and moodle)

I am doing some web hosting on Dreamhost, and I’m using their cheap, cheap, shared hosting plan. This means that I’m given a user slot on one of their shared (virtual?) machines. That means I’m rootless, and in the shell world, that sucks!

Also I wanted to install Jekyll, Pygments, and do that with an up-to-date version of Ruby. Now, I’m sure the following instructions will be outdated within a year and a half (my references for this blog: like this and this), but here goes. From here on out LM> is Local Machine and RM> is Remote Machine when you see the shell snippets.

0. SSH into your Dreamhost shell

So from your terminal that should look like:

LM> ssh myUser@myDomain.com

If you haven’t set up authorized_keys yet, don’t worry, we’ll get to that.

1. Installing RVM

Installling rvm should be trivial:

 RM> bash -s stable < <(curl -s https://raw.github.com/wayneeseguin/rvm/master/binscripts/rvm-installer)  

2. Install a non-antiqued Ruby

This is where it got tricky for me. I encountered a problem after trying to install ruby-2.0.0.

RM> rvm install ruby-2.0.0
RM> ERROR: Missing required packages: libreadline6-dev, libyaml-dev, automake, libtool, libffi-dev

Grr. This was maddening. Finally I hunted down some information that recommends that you NOT do the following because it’s not a very thoroughly tested option. Oh well, I prefer working at this point, so onward:

RM> rvm autolibs rvm_pkg

Now you should be able to install a newer Ruby!

RM> rvm install ruby-2.0.0

NOTE: If this looks like it’s just hanging (on libtool maybe), check your logfile - it’s probably not hanging, it’s just waiting for you to press a key to continue.

Now, after installation, verify your Ruby version with ruby -v and then source your *rc file (.bashrc/.zshrc) with source ~/.bashrc.

3. Install Jekyll with Pygments

This seemed to be the easiest part of the install

    RM> gem install jekyll
    RM> mkdir ~/soft && mkdir ~/packages && mkdir ~/packages/lib && ~/packages/lib/python && cd ~/soft
    RM> echo 'export PYTHONPATH="$HOME/packages/lib/python:/usr/lib/python2.6"' >> ~/.bash_profile
    RM> source ~/.bash_profile
    RM> wget http://pypi.python.org/packages/source/P/Pygments/Pygments-1.6.tar.gz
    RM> tar -xvzf Pygments-1.6.tar.gz
    RM> cd Pygments-1.6
    RM> python setup.py install --home=$HOME/packages

This is just from the Dreamhost wiki. You should probably verify that the correct key is cat’d into your authorized_keys file after you do it…

    LM> scp ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub user@example.com:~/

    RM> cat id_rsa.pub >> .ssh/authorized_keys
    RM> rm id_rsa.pub
    RM> chmod go-w ~
    RM> chmod 700 ~/.ssh
    RM> chmod 600 ~/.ssh/authorized_keys

5. Create your Git repos for Jekyll

To do that, we have to set up our repos locally and remotely (thanks to this blog)… also don’t forget to modify the myUser parts below!

    LM> mkdir repo && cd repo
    LM> git init 
    LM> git add * 
    LM> git commit -m "Created my repo" 
    
    RM> mkdir gitprojects && cd gitprojects
    RM> mkdir repo.git && cd repo.git
    RM> git --bare init
    
    LM> git remote add origin ssh://myUser@myDomain.com/home/myUser/gitprojects/repo.git
    LM> git push --all origin

6. Setup Git to Run Jekyll when it is pushed to (auto-publishing FTW!)

This is the part that I really wanted. I love how GitHub Pages allows you to just push a markdown post to the server and boom, it’s published as a blog post. Again, these tips are thanks to the blog linked to in step 5. We need to navigate to /home/myUser/gitprojects/repo.git/hooks and edit the post-receive file. Here’s what you should put in there (you may also need to chmod ug+x according to it and mods by me)

    #!/bin/sh
    GIT_REPO=$HOME/gitprojects/repo.git
    TMP_GIT_CLONE=$HOME/tmp/myDomain.com
    PUBLIC_WWW=$HOME/myDomain.com

    git clone $GIT_REPO $TMP_GIT_CLONE
    jekyll build --source $TMP_GIT_CLONE --destination $PUBLIC_WWW
    cd ~ 
    rm -rf $TMP_GIT_CLONE
    exit

7. Moodle on Dreamhost

Dreamhost offers some old version of Moodle as a one-click install, but it’s so old and ugly there’s no way you’d ever want to use it. But I ran into issues trying to install v2.0+ on Dreamhost because the web setup kept dying on me. After a lot of looking around, the answer is: turn off FastCGI. After the install is complete you can turn it back on, but for the installation it has to be off for the domain you’re installing Moodle on.

That’s it! You made it! And hopefully this saves you some of the headache I went through!