I looked over mod_rails today and realized how nice and easy looking it was to install.
The general install process is:
1. Install rubygems
2. Run gem install passenger
3. passenger-install-apache2-module
4. Follow the instructions and install any missing dependencies (it actually is smart enough to detect which ones you need before splatting itself into the filesystem)
5. Add some lines into the apache conf somewhere, declare a virtual host and point DocumentRoot to the public folder of the desired Rails app
By piggypacking onto the gems installation infrastructure they made it really simple to install even without support from native package managers (although my hope is that it will be as easy as apt-get install modrails one day).
However, always the skeptic I decided to give it a quick and dirty test run and lo’ and behold it really is as easy as advertised and looks like it’s working okay.
Impressive stuff. Now I just need to read a little more on how it actually works (seems to hand off to some sort of backend process that is intelligent enough to spawn a set number of backend rails processes as needed and kills any that are idle off or continue serving if things are busy). So for those of you looking to deploy rails within an apache setup, this might be a nice and simple way (assuming you have access to manage the apache server process) to integrate rails within Apache.
I’m still unclear how many rails apps can be multiplexed on a realistic basis with one Apache installation with this method but a little bit of trial and error should give some ideas.
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