Passenger Takes The Pain Out Of Rails Deployment
One of the biggest gripes with Ruby on Rails has been the pain it can cause when it comes to deployment. Since Rails was released there have been an evolution from
- Apache with FCGI to…
- Mongrel to..
- Mongrel with an Apache frontend to finally…
- Mongrel with an nginx frontend
which is a bit more effort than for instance trying to setup PHP which requires just Apache and mod_php.
Luckily Passenger has been released by the guys at Phusion. Put simply Passenger is mod_rails for Apache. You configure your application directory in your Apache config file and simply drop your application in that directory and Passenger will pick it up and execute it. According to initial benchmarks released it provides excellent performance as well.
At the moment it’s a Rails only plugin, but I wouldn’t expect there to be to long before it’s widened to other frameworks. In particular providing support for Rack would allow for a whole host of new and exciting frameworks.
Aimred is a specialist Ruby and Ruby on Rails development house and consultancy based in Cape Town, South Africa.