Al Hoang

Before there was Rails, there existed other Web Frameworks for Ruby. One of the promising ones is Nitro however it fell into realm of ignorance. On some random surfing I ran across this blog post from one of the main authors of the Nitro Web Framework.

It’s an interesting read since the author laments how Nitro could have been a contender but it never took off. The comments are enlightening since it seems there were project (mis)management issues that prevented a community from really forming around Nitro. Anyways, by now, Rails has the lion’s share of the attention so any hopes now would rest on it being so much better that people will switch. My understanding is that it has some things that are better but not such a big enough jump to make people interested, unfortunately.

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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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