Partly Cloudy with a chance of Rubies

I recently spotted Thomas Fahle's post on OpenShift Express (Red Hat's Cloud) and I wanted to try it. I'm on Ubuntu, though, so the yum repository is no help. It turns out those rhc-* tools are written in Ruby, so...problem solved!

gem install rhc

Done! Wow. Alright, let's try it!

$ rhc-create-domain -n oylenshpeegul -l notmyrealaddress@example.com
/usr/share/ruby-rvm/rubies/ruby-1.9.3-/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.9.1/rubygems/custom_require.rb:36:in
`require': no such file to load -- openssl (LoadError)
...

Another snag! Apparently, Ruby is unhappy with Ubuntu's shiny new OpenSSL

$ openssl version
OpenSSL 1.0.0e 6 Sep 2011

Instead, let's let rvm get a clunky old OpenSSL just for Ruby

$ rvm package install openssl
Fetching openssl-0.9.8n.tar.gz to /usr/share/ruby-rvm/archives
  % Total    % Received % Xferd  Average Speed   Time    Time     Time  Current
                                 Dload  Upload   Total   Spent    Left  Speed
100 3681k  100 3681k    0     0  91489      0  0:00:41  0:00:41 --:--:--  111k
--no-same-owner
Configuring openssl in /usr/share/ruby-rvm/src/openssl-0.9.8n.
Compiling openssl in /usr/share/ruby-rvm/src/openssl-0.9.8n.
Installing openssl to /usr/share/ruby-rvm/usr
ERROR: Error running '/usr/bin/make install',
please read /usr/share/ruby-rvm/log/openssl/make.install.log

Oops.

$ sudo rvm package install openssl

Okay, now if we rebuild Ruby 1.9.3 with this OpenSSL

$ rvm remove 1.9.3
$ rvm install 1.9.3 --with-openssl-dir=$rvm_path/usr
$ rvm use 1.9.3
$ gem install rhc

we should be all set!

$ rhc-create-domain -n oylenshpeegul -l notmyrealaddress@example.com

Created local config file: /home/tim/.openshift/express.conf
express.conf contains user configuration and can be transferred
  across clients.

Whew! Okay, now back to Fahle's instructions

$ rhc-create-app -a X1 -t perl-5.10 
Password: 

Found a bug? Post to the forum and we'll get right on it.
    IRC: #openshift on freenode
    Forums: https://www.redhat.com/openshift/forums

Attempting to create remote application space: X1
...

Alright! If we visit http://X1-oylenshpeegul.rhcloud.com/, we see that OpenShift welcome page. Let's put something else there. If we create a file called X1/perl/hello.pl that looks like this

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;
use CGI qw(:standard);

print header, start_html('Hello'), p('Hello, world!'), end_html;

then we can upload it with git

$ cd X1
$ git add perl/hello.pl
$ git commit -m 'say hello'
$ git push

Now if we visit http://x1-oylenshpeegul.rhcloud.com/hello.pl, we see

 

Yay! OpenShift sure seems easy to use. Now for something a little more complicated...