Westhost on Rails

Now that I’ve had to muddle through it a few times, I decided that, for my own sanity and to aid anyone else out there who may be going through the same thing, I would put together a comprehensive tutorial on how to install Ruby on Rails at Westhost. The major problems that arise and could trip you up are

1. Westhost runs Apache 1.3,
2. FastCGI is not installed (and Rails will run incredibly slow without it), and
3. you cannot install applications in /usr/bin.

This tutorial will get you up and running with a very simple Rails page on your Westhost VPS server using Apache 1.3 with FastCGI. For simplicity’s sake, I am going to set up the test Rails app on its own hostname (demo.yoursitehere.com).