RubyFlow The Ruby and Rails community linklog

Phusion Passenger (mod_rails) Now Available

Phusion Passenger, a.k.a. mod_rails, beta now available for download. Quote: “… makes deployment of applications built on the revolutionary Ruby on Rails web framework a breeze.”

Comments

This looks very promising. Any chance for nginx support? How about some of the other Ruby web frameworks?

BTW, I’ve heard from users using SwitchPipe with nginx (and Apache, and lighttpd, and some other weird stuff I’m not familiar with) and it works fine with any Ruby framework.

Passenger is a strong competitor in the Apache & Rails sphere only. As they say, they want to be a “master” rather than “jack” of all trades :)

Hardbap: Did you just e-mail me about editing this item? If so, sorry.. it was in my spam and it flashed by as I was deleting! Feel free to e-mail again, although the answer for now is that no, you can’t.

codebrulee: Yeah, it’s been going okay! A significant stability issue (for some people) was resolved a week or two ago, and I’ve personally had it running for just over two months with several apps (not all Rails). I’ve even had some nice reports from people deploying it on Solaris (!)

@PeterCooper - yeah I did send you an email about this item. Thanks for fixing it.

Peter: Are you running RubyFlow or Ruby Inside with SwitchPipe?

Ruby Inside is WordPress, so PHP ;-)

RubyFlow is on SwitchPipe, yes. Currently I’ve set it to run a minimum of one Mongrel at all time (just so it’s faster for now, but it initially ran with no minimum) and a maximum of two or three. It’s still using SQLite and doing pretty well! JRubyInside is on the same install, as is PythonFlow, along with a few other client apps. I didn’t need to restart to add the new apps. Just uploaded, dumped in a config file, and it’s up.

Is RubyFlow a custom Ruby app? I’d be interested to hear more about how you’ve put it together. (tweeted about it)

This blog post covers the bare basics. Really, just an ultra simple Rails app, bare bones HTML (to a point), running it on a CentOS server running CPanel with Apache and then SwitchPipe controlling the app. Up to 3 Mongrels max, minimum of 1 (to maintain speed) - will switch to Thin shortly though. Using SQLite 3 database and cookied sessions (though this has caused a bug where login is not remembered - need to fix!).. so as bare bones as you can get really.

That said, even though it’s bare bones, attr_accessible is used all over the place for security, and the code is so light that I’ve removed most of the “dangerous” stuff that scaffolding would otherwise leave in. Just tried to be as lean as possible (while still using Rails) really.

It was developed last Tuesday in basically a single session. Soft tested that night, launched proper on Wednesday/Thursday. Served about 5500 pageviews on Thursday and 700ish RSS subscribers so far.

I like the idea of Passenger and I think it will be a great boon to Rails adoption on shared hosts. However, installing it from scratch doesn’t seem much easier than installing Nginx and Mongrel.

On Mac OS X, I had to recompile Apache2 and fiddle with the Apache config (by default it denies all static requests). People who are comfortable with that could probably switch to Nginx and have the convenience Nginx’s config file directives (or copy one of the existing ones already customized for Rails).

Peter, I remember someone said, why Ruby/rails wouldn’t go mainstream compared to PHP because it’s hard to deploy. My opinion was, passenger was one of the solution. Thus I really think we should support it more.

I tried moving from an nginx/mongrel yesterday and it was such a breeze.

Rails, not Ruby and Rails. Passenger only supports Rails. And I’d say it’s being “supported” for sure. It’s been linked on lots of blogs, topped del.icio.us/popular/rails, and even had DHH talking about it, so I’m not sure it needs much more ;-)

Post a comment

You can use basic HTML markup (e.g. <a>) or Markdown.

As you are not logged in, you will be
directed via GitHub to signup or sign in