Best practices for new Rails deployments on Linux?

Question

I\'ve used straight Mongrel, I\'ve used Mongrel clusters behind Apache, I\'ve looked at Thin, and I\'m becoming very intrigued by Passenger. I\'ve looked at Nginx, too. I\'ve lo

Answer 1

We have switched fron NginX+Mongrel to Passenger.

I fully believe that Passenger is going to be the new standard for rails, despite NginX and Mongrel cluster being endorsed by some very smart people. Recent advances in Passenger have really propelled it forward.

Our current configuration is something like this:

Web servers

• Ubuntu 8.04 LTS
• Phusion Passenger on Apache2
• MRI Ruby 1.8.6 and friends (form apt)
• Ruby Gems 1.3.0 (Installed from source)

Database servers

• Centos 5
• MySQL Cluster (we just switched to this, but it is promising)

Having standardized on the exact linux distro we've been able to write Capitrano recipes to help deployment (slight variations in configuration have been the source of MANY service outages) and otherwise simplify our lives.