RubyJudo

There are a nauseating array of options to choose from when deciding how you’re going to stick your Ruby on Rails application up on a web server. There is no real canonical formula (yet), and depending on your needs, there may be multiple passable options—though none of them are entirely pretty or elegant.

The most common stack for a while was Apache or Lighty using FCGI. The release of Mongrel has completely changed that. Mongrel is in itself a very basic web server, similar to WEBrick. Mongrel is capable of serving up your Rails application over HTTP without FCGI. Unfortunately, it is very limited (can’t host multiple sites, doesn’t have a rewrite library, doesn’t support SSL, etc), so in most cases you’ll have to stick another server out in front of it to handle those things and then proxy Rails requests over to Mongrel. So, the question is, what do you put out in front of Mongrel to proxy requests?

I’m not going to discuss all the options, but if you’re looking for what appears to be (at the moment) a setup that is a breeze to install and will churn out more requests/second than anything else, read on.

Hello, my name is JD, and I have been a professional Rails developer for about a year. Over the past several months, I have also been helping Ryan build Lovetastic. I'll usually be posting content of a more technical nature, but I hope to keep my posts understandable for all.

Rails developers are beginning to find themselves lost in a sea of multiple deployment options. Mongrel is the up-and-coming deployment option for Rails, while FastCGI is quickly becoming the dinosaur. It seems likely that by the time Rails 1.2 rolls out, Mongrel will be the recommended way to deploy into production. To bring myself up to speed, I recently spent some time learning more about Mongrel, the latest and greatest way to get your Rails app running smoothly.