But, new tools may have been written in the two years since we first decided Convection was necessary. If you find any other free tools that solve this problem, please let me know.

Some managed, shared-hosting environments (like Dreamhost) solve this by providing a one-click “enable Passenger for Rails on this domain” in their control panel. But if you are really in a controlled environment and it doesn’t provide such an option, Rails applications may just not be an option for you. If it’s that sort of managed environment, I’d suggest contacting the hosting provider’s tech support and asking if they support Ruby on Rails.

Since convection is a Rails application, you will still need to do more than upload the files and run a script, however. Rails runs within its own in-memory application, and Apache needs to be told launch that application. The easiest way to do this is to install Phusion Passenger as a module to apache.

If your server already has rubygems (Ruby’s package manager) installed, there is a passenger gem that can walk you through this process very quickly. The instructions are in the modrails link above.

Then you’ll want to set up an Apache virtualhost for the application. Rails applications really want their own domain or sub-domain (i.e. file-exchange.yourdomain.com), rather than to run in a subdirectory of your existing site (yourdomain.com/file-exchange). It’s possible to do the latter, but I promise it’s not worth the hassle. There are a few minor tricks of writing a vhost file for a rails application: the most important one is that if you upload your rails application to, say, /web/files/convection, then you point apache’s DocumentRoot not to that directory, but to /web/files/convection/public. This is because everything outside the ‘public’ directory in a Rails application is used by Rails to run the site and is not meant to be visible to the public. This approach – relative to the one used by joomla – means you don’t have to worry so much about your file permissions from a security perspective. (Because things outside the public subdirectory are never even examined by Apache and can’t be served).

Once your server is up with a domain and vhost configured, and you’ve uploaded the files, you do need to create a database, and seed it with a few initial records (like the first admin account). Documentation on doing this can be found in the convection README. https://github.com/LRDesign/Convection

To edit the specifics of the database connection username, password, etc., edit the file config/database.yml in the uploaded copy of Convection.

It’s definitely not as easy to set up and deploy a Rails application as a PHP-based one like Joomla. This is the tradeoff we make for the much friendlier development environment of Rails. However, there are many good guides to deploying Rails around the ‘net, google will help you find them.

If you are setting it up yourself, there are many options for building a Rails-capable webserver. I personally think a standard Apache server with Phusion Passenger installed is the easiest.

However, if you are very new to web dev, be prepared for a sharp learning curve. Stick to it, however, and you’ll get there. Do you have experience setting up Linux environments? If not, you may need to start there. Here’s a good guide to getting a full stack (linux -> apache -> passenger -> Rails) running on a Ubuntu server:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/RubyOnRails

Also, here’s the Phusion Passenger install guide: http://www.modrails.com/install.html

Let me know if this helps!