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

I switched from Mongrel Cluster to Passenger two weeks ago (Debian Linux Server). I didn't look back for a second. Passenger is probably the easiest way to get your new server up and running. Performance and reliability are reasonable too.

Personally, I like to spend my time working on exciting new Rails projects rather than dealing with deployment issues - Passenger enables me to do exactly that. However, Mongrel or something else may still be preferable if you have some kind special requirements (doesn't apply for most products).

Answer 2

Have a look at Litespeed. You can get a free version that runs on 1 cpu or pay to get multi cpu. It is a bit expensive but is rock solid and handles rails brilliantly (i.e. uses less memory and is less of an overhead to monitor and setup). I run a massive amount of apps on it and it doesn't miss a beat.

Answer 3

Another bit of gold:

Josh Peek's Slicehost gem is full of Capistrano recipes that are much simpler and much more organized than Deprec. Nothing in there is especially Slicehost-specific, either.

Answer 4

I'm hosting my new apps with Apache2 and Passenger on Ubuntu Hardy. Seems like the easiest and best option for most scenarios. I have just joined Slicehost.com for that purpose. They seem to get good reviews and have the most competitive prices of first class hosts.

I can't really endorse them yet because I'm a new client but the set of guides and range of support options is impressive.

What you are not mentioning is how large and popular your app is/will be. This criteria could affect the decision process.

Answer 5

We also switched from Mongrel to mod_passenger and found stability greatly improved with this effort required to setup and maintain. Good choice.

Answer 6

Capistrano + Deprec for actually setting up my stack on Ubuntu and physically managing the deployment.

Nginx proxying to Mongrel clusers for the server architecture. It isn't the newest, bleeding edge technique but it works well, it is getting well-documented, and it is very, very high performance even when working on small VPSes. Assuming you haven't borked the application you can Slashdot a 128 MB Slicehost VPS and it just keeps coming back for more.

Having said that: there were a lot of gotchas the first time around, until I figured out how Nginx actually worked. After that its amazing -- like a little Apachelet with a slight Russian accent.