Radu Cojocaru Blog

How to setup a VPS with Ubuntu

Steps:

1. Add user with admin rights

   adduser radu
   visudo

   add line:

   radu   ALL=(ALL) ALL

2. Secure SSH access

   nano /etc/ssh/sshd_config

   add lines:

   Port 380
   X11Forwarding no
   AllowUsers radu
   PermitRootLogin no

3. Update packages sources

   sudo aptitude update

4. Set system locale

   sudo locale-gen en_GB.UTF-8
   sudo /usr/sbin/update-locale LANG=en_GB.UTF-8

5. Update system

   sudo aptitude safe-upgrade
   sudo aptitude full-upgrade
   sudo aptitude install build-essential

6. Install Apache and PHP

   sudo aptitude install apache2 apache2.2-common apache2-mpm-prefork apache2-utils libexpat1 ssl-cert
   sudo aptitude install libapache2-mod-php5 php5 php5-common php5-curl php5-dev php5-gd php5-imagick php5-mcrypt php5-memcache php5-mhash php5-mysql php5-pspell php5-snmp php5-sqlite php5-xmlrpc php5-xsl

7. Install mysql

   sudo aptitude install mysql-server mysql-client libmysqlclient15-dev libmysql-ruby1.8 -y

8. Install DNS tools

   sudo apt-get install bind9
   sudo apt-get install dnsutils

9. Install Webmin

   wget http://puzzle.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/webadmin/webmin_1.441_all.deb
   sudo apt-get install libnet-ssleay-perl libauthen-pam-perl libio-pty-perl libmd5-perl
   sudo dpkg --install webmin_1.441_all.deb

Tips:

# check Ubuntu version
cat /etc/lsb-release
 
# restart apache
sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 reload
 
# restart apache without closing existing connections
sudo apache2ctl graceful
 
# compress
tar -cvzf file.tar.gz dir/              
 
# decompress
tar -xvzf file.tar.gz
 
# reload SSH configuration
/etc/init.d/ssh reload

Generate PDFs in Rails using Prawn

I needed recently the ability the generate PDFs from a Rails application (for a personal project). I decided to try Prawn library and it was quite enjoyable: all the code to generate PDFs goes into views (so you can use all your helpers) and it’s pretty easy to create PDFs with a custom layout (boxes in different positions on the page).

Here are some links to the resources I used:

• screencast from Railscasts: http://railscasts.com/episodes/153-pdfs-with-prawn
• Prawn docs: http://prawn.majesticseacreature.com/docs/prawn-core/
• Prawn layout docs, useful if you need to use tables: http://prawn.majesticseacreature.com/docs/prawn-layout/
• Prawnto - a plugin for Rails that allows you to have views with .prawn extension: http://www.cracklabs.com/prawnto

The PDFs that I need to generate were not so complicated (some text in boxes positioned in custom places on the page and a table) and Prawn was a very good solution for that. I’ll write a new post when I’ll use more advanced capabilities like the use of images and fonts.

How to Configure ActionMailer with a Gmail Account

Gmail authentication uses SSL and you need to have tlsmail gem installed:

gem install tlsmail

Actual configuration lines go into config/environments/production.rb:

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# required by Gmail
require 'tlsmail'
Net::SMTP.enable_tls(OpenSSL::SSL::VERIFY_NONE)
 
# ActionMailer configuration
config.action_mailer.perform_deliveries = true
config.action_mailer.delivery_method = :smtp
config.action_mailer.default_charset = "utf-8"
config.action_mailer.raise_delivery_errors = true
 
ActionMailer::Base.smtp_settings = {
  :domain => "DOMAIN-HERE.COM", :user_name => 'USERNAME-HERE', :password => 'PASSWORD-HERE',
  :address => 'smtp.gmail.com', :tls => true, :port => 587, :authentication => :login
}

Don’t forget to replace the credentials above with the credentials from your account.