Dealing with Ruby on Rails Applications

When I first launched my first web site in Ruby on Rails (RoR) to get my store for ReceiptWallet (based on Potion Store) going, I learned a little bit about performance. A basic RoR application is launched each time a user hits a web site; this, of course, is only for development and isn’t practical for a production site. I opted to use lighttpd and FastCGI which worked well. However, modifying an part of the application required killing processes and restarting lighttd.

As a learned more about RoR and had to deploy more applications, I started using mongrel as we had a bug with lighttd that caused our application to not handle uploads. So I’ve been using mongrel for a bunch of RoR applications on 4 separate servers. Things work OK, but each time an application is updated, I have to either restart all of mongrel or kill individual processes and restart them (if I restart mongrel, non-updated apps get restarted and could disrupt people).

Last night as I was trying to catch up on some of my research (quiet time is only at night and allows me to leisurely do research), I came across Passenger which makes deploying RoR simple. All I have to do is setup the virtual host and point it to the RoR’s public directory and presto; this is in comparison to setting up mongrel with proxies from Apache. In addition, in order to restart an application after I update it, I just do ‘touch tmp/restart.txt’. Wow, that’s easy!

Is Passenger the holy grail for managing my RoR applications? It’s too early to know, but I’m optimistic.

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