How do I go about setting up my Sinatra REST API o

Question

I'm an iOS developer primarily. In building my current app, I needed a server that would have a REST API with a couple of GET requests. I spent a little time learning Ruby, and landed on using Sinatra, a simple web framework. I can run my server script, and access it from a browser at localhost:4567, with a request then being localhost:4567/hello, as an example.

Here's where I feel out of my depth. I setup an Ubuntu droplet at DigitalOcean, and felt my way around to setting up all necessary tools via command line, until I could again run my server, now on this droplet.

The problem then is that I couldn't then access my server via droplet.ip.address:4567, and a bit of research lead me to discovering I need Passenger and an Apache HTTP Server to be setup, and not with simple instructions.

I'm way in over my head here, and I don't feel comfortable. There must be a better way for me to take my small group of ruby files and run this on a server, than me doing this. But I have no idea what I'm doing.

Any help or advice would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

bit of research lead me to discovering I need Passenger and an Apache HTTP Server to be setup, and not with simple instructions.

Ignore that for now. Take baby steps first. You should be able to run your Sinatra app from the command line on the DigitalOcean droplet, and then access it via droplet.ip.address:4567. If that doesn't work something very fundamental is wrong.

When you start your app, you will see what address and port the app is listening on. Make sure it's 0.0.0.0 and 4567. If it's 127.0.0.1 or localhost that means it will only service requests originating from the same machine

After you get this working, next step is to make your Sinatra app into a service. Essentially this means the app runs in the background, and auto-starts when the system reboots. Look into Supervisor which is very simple configuration to get this running.

Later you can install Apache or Nginx to put in front of your Sinatra app. These are proxies which simply forward requests from port 80 (default HTTP port) to your sinatra app, but can do additional things such as add SSL support, load balancing, custom error pages etc. - all of which you do not need right now.