Passenger debuted today and boy was I excited. Mod Rails (Passenger) for those of you who don’t know already is an apache module that lets you deploy Ruby on Rails applications just like you do PHP applications. I can hear you saying, “So What?” already!
Ruby on Rails has offered some great application deployment tools like Capistrano for ages already. The problem has been that there were no fast, easy to configure and shared hosting friendly models to deploy your Ruby on Rails applications to once you were ready! The preferred method, currently, is to deploy your application from SVN using Capistrano to a webserver running nginx and a mongrel cluster. It’s a smooth and cool way of doing things, but isn’t very dummy proof, or frugal with system resources. Likewise, multiple application deployments using this method can cause headaches if you’re attempting to deploy multiple versions to the same server.
Enter Passenger.
Passenger emerged from secrecy around March 20th with a screencast that looked like a prelude to an epic April Fool’s day joke. It, however, was no joke and Hongli Lai and Ninh Bui demonstrated the deployment system that everyone in the Ruby on Rails community had hoped was coming.
What makes Passenger so special?
- Ease of Installation: Installing a Ruby Gem and changing a few lines in your httpd.conf
- Multiple Application Handling: Passenger can handle as many Rails applications as you want to throw at it without adding anything more than a VirtualHost directive in your httpd.conf
- Smart Application Scaling: Passenger adds and removes threads dynamically as your application needs them.
- Many More: There are about 50 or 60 other notable things about this application as well, but I think most compelling is that Computer Scientists are taking note and want to write Academic papers about how Passenger handles application serving.
In 45 minutes was able to:
- Download & Compile Ruby On Rails with OpenSSL
- Install RubyGems
- Install the MySQL Gem
- Install the Rails Gem
- Install the Passenger Gem
- Configure Apache
- Create a Sample Ruby on Rails Application
- User my Ruby on Rails Application
That is a huge accomplishment. I will be adding a quick tutorial for setting up Passenger on WestHost within the next week or so. This is a huge step forward for Ruby on Rails. In the words of Ruby on Rails founder and creator David Heinemeier Hansson, “This could become very popular, very fast!”
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