Over the course of this series of articles, I will cover the build and configuration of an Amazon EC2 Instance capable of serving Ruby on Rails applications. The series will cover the build and installation of Nginx from source, virtual host and proxy configuration within Nginx, installation of Ruby and RubyGems, installation of the Rails and Thin gems, and the deployment of a set of clustered Thin workers. I chose Nginx over Apache HTTPD as it is renowned for both performing very well as a reverse proxy as well as serving static content whilst having a very low memory footprint. Plus, I’m always interested in looking at “alternative” software solutions to common problems.
Read my article around EC2 instance management via the ec2-api-tools if you’d like to provision your instance(s) via the command line, otherwise just provision your instance(s) via the EC2 Management Console. This article presumes that you have an instance running and ready to go. I used ami-08df4961 (which is Ubuntu 12.10 i386 Server, EBS-backed). I’d use a RHEL instance but they are not eligible for the free tier due to licensing, plus the Ubuntu instances are very well supported by Canonical.