Time For A Grown-Up Server: Rails, Mongrel, Apache, Capistrano and You | codablog | Coda Hale

Posted on November 16, 2007 in How-to

Time For A Grown-Up Server: Rails, Mongrel, Apache, Capistrano and You | codablog | Coda Hale
More and more Rails developers are finding out that deploying a Rails application isn’t as simple as upload and rename; Rails apps work best when running all the time, and many Rails programmers are moving from traditional, shared hosts, like Dreamhost, to virtual private servers, like Rimuhosting, which allow them full control and responsibility of production servers.

Given this freedom, there are now a huge number of options available for deploying a Rails application, which is rare for such a new technology. So what to use? Apache FastCGI? Lighttpd FastCGI? SCGI? Apache 2? Litespeed? Mongrel? In what configuration? So many questions, so few answers. Here’s what I’ve been deleriously happy with, and how to do it yourself: Mongrel, Apache 2.2, and mod_proxy_balancer, using Capistrano to keep everything at your fingertips.