Working With Rails

I’m gearing up to use mod_rails on one project but I may not have any “real” benchmarks for a week, maybe two. I’ll let you know, but maybe someone else can post something before hand. Looks dead simple though! I’m excited!

I recently moved a set of three older Rails applications that used Apache/fastCGI to a new server and used Apache2/Passenger/mod_rails.

The three apps are in the directories on both servers. (Documents is the web server document root under Mac OS X, substitute your document root directory)

• /Documents/Store/CustomerService
• /Documents/Store/Inventory
• /Documents/Store/Orders

After installing mod_rails I modified the Apache2 httpd.conf to add these directives:

LoadModule passenger_module /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/passenger-1.0.5/ext/apache2/mod_passenger.so
RailsSpawnServer /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/passenger-1.0.5/bin/passenger-spawn-server
RailsRuby /System/Library/Frameworks/Ruby.framework/Versions/1.8/usr/bin/ruby

# 4 hours idle time so apps will live a long time.
RailsPoolIdleTime 14400

<VirtualHost *:80>
 ServerName localhost
 DocumentRoot /Library/WebServer/Documents

 RailsBaseURI /Store/Orders/public
 RailsBaseURI /Store/Inventory/public
 RailsBaseURI /Store/CustomerService/public
</VirtualHost>

After restarting Apache2 I was able to run each of the apps from URL’s like

http://localhost/Store/<app>/public/<controller>/<method>

Note that the case of the URL has to match the case of the RailsBaseURI which has to match the case of the actual directories.

I’ve been using mod_rails with capistrano for a while now and haven’t had any problems other than the odd restart failing here and there, requiring an apache restart.

installing mod_rails on ubuntu and deploying is fairly easy and seems somewhat relieable. touching restart.txt is working sometimes.
but, anyone uses engines in your rails app ? i experienced strange behaviour in configuring the static content paths in these subdirectories and referencing images within image_tag. all my applications without engines are working fine.

I’m using Mac OS Leopard for developing and Ubuntu for production -deploying with capistrano.
Had no any problems with restart or/and performance.
Restart works just well.
desc “Restart Application” task :restart, :roles => :app do run “touch #{app_current_path}/tmp/restart.txt” end

where app_current_path is the RAILS_ROOT, or Rails.root for edge rails ;)

Too good if memory consumption is considered. Still waiting for a mature release of product or a large site deployed on it. I’ll not take a risk of deploying a huge application on mod_rails yet since I have faced the ruby code being broken at several places frequently in my deployed test applications.