Joe’s Amazing Technicolor Weblog

In short, I’m happy to report that passenger a.k.a. mod_rails is awesome. I see no need to fiddle with mongrel, mongrel_cluster & mod_proxy for future rails apps.

Miscellaneous notes from the project:

• My environment is now ubuntu server 8.04, on slicehost. This project finally prompted me to upgrade from 7.10, which went very smootly — the long-term support releases of Ubuntu seem like the way to go for most server situations.
• How to handle the apache config? We have some php stuff running on this server, too, so the 3rd party ubuntu passenger package, which wants to use the worker mpm, isn’t the hot ticket. No problem, passenger’s default gem-based install is smooth as butter.
  This configuration also seems to require RailsAutoDetect off, which had the side benefit of letting me leave an existing mongrel-using configuration alone until I had a few minutes hours to upgrade it to rails 2.2.2, then switch it over to git & passenger.
• Slicehost has decent docs for this, in particular ubuntu-hardy-mod_rails-installation and ubuntu-hardy-using-mod_rails-to-serve-your-application & its comments.
• Capistrano mods for passenger
• This was also my first git-powered rails app, which proved a little challenging to get going with cap, but has turned out really nicely. Very fast deployments.
  Along the way, having a plugin as a git submodule proved to be more trouble than it was with, though I’m not sure if that’d apply to my final configuration, which involves checking the project out from the same server as it’s deployed on,  using the :local_repository argument to capistrano.
• This project helped me realize that having a deployed app as a public github project is more trouble than it’s worth, what with the various configuration informations that I’d rather have under SCM but don’t want to share.