ThetaCom.info

“Phusion Passenger™ (a.k.a. mod_rails) is a open source product that enables people to deploy their Ruby on Rails applications in an upload-and-go manner, which is very reminiscent of the PHP way of deploying.

Phusion Passenger’s ability to automatically manage Rails server processes lowers system administration, while retaining stability/robustness and performance.”

That seems to sum it all up pretty well.  Passenger has been getting a lot of attention in the Rails community lately.  So I decided to give it a try.  Currently I’m developing on an Apple PowerBook G4 laptop with OS X 10.5 Combined with Textmate, Console and Firefox this has made an excellent development platform.   I wouldn’t go so far as to say thay rails deployment is difficult, but I do agree with Passenger supporters that it could be made even easier.

After doing some googling, I decided I was ready to give it a go. I downloaded Passenger from modrails.com and the Preference Pane for OS X. Now I know the preference pane isn’t a necessity, but it sure made the configuring new virtual hosts a breeze.  For about two weeks now, I have been using Passenger for my rails development.  So far it feels like a perfect fit.  With a bit more tinkering and testing I will probably feel confident enough to use it in a production environment, but we’ll see.

I have been well pleased by mod_rails and I can see it being one of the next big evolutionary steps for Rails.  There appears to be a lot of competition on the horizon but Phusion has made a great product to push the envelope.  With it’s ease of use and tons of great tutorials to point out any gotchas or possible problems; I would definitely recommend you try out Passenger for yourself if you haven’t already.