Deploying on Phusion Passenger
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A very large number of PHP developers, perhaps even the majority, are building smaller web applications. These applications receive only a moderate amount of traffic and usually have a single database server, often on the same machine.
Deployment, or moving your application to production for use by real customers, is largely an afterthought for these small PHP applications. In many cases, decent PHP code can just be installed on the server and it runs without much trouble.
One of the points we stress towards the back of our book is that deploying Rails applications can be more difficult than deploying their PHP counterparts. There are more moving parts and things to you’ll need to learn. Until you get the hang of it, deploying even small Rails applications can be frustrating.
A recent development has greatly improved this situation.
Introducing Phusion Passenger
PHP can be deployed using a variety of server configurations. Some of these can be just as frustrating as traditional Rails deployments. However, the majority of PHP applications are still deployed on Apache using
mod_php. PHP’s tight integration with Apache is simple, proven, and just works for many needs.Phusion is a small company in the Netherlands that recently released an open source product called Passenger (
mod_rails). Passenger aims to take the complexity out of deploying Rails applications by also integrating with Apache.Installing Passenger on the average Linux or Mac server is usually simple. It is installed as a gem and contains an automated installer program that compiles and installs the necessary components. Once installed, many Rails applications can be deployed under Apache simply by configuring a VirtualHost for each application. The installer even outputs an example for you to copy and paste.
Passenger gives a deployment experience closer to what we’ve come to appreciate with PHP. In the background, there’s still more moving parts, but Passenger automatically manages them. It spawns Rails application server processes, proxies to them, and largely eliminates the configuration and glue that other Rails deployment options leave up to you. Passenger has nice documentation for when some configuration is necessary.
At work, we develop applications in both PHP and Ruby. We’ve been testing Passenger for a few weeks on a dedicated server and recently deployed an application on it. We have been very impressed with its reliability, performance, and easy-of-use compared to previous Rails deployment options. You should give Passenger strong consideration, especially if you’re just starting out.
Finally, Rails on Shared Hosting
Traditionally, deploying Rails applications on shared hosts (usually with FastCGI) has been difficult and unreliable. Due to this, many Rails applications are deployed on small VPS plans from providers like Rimuhosting and Slicehost. These run well, typically using small Mongrel cluster behind a frontend proxy balancer. However, VPS plans are usually more expensive and more work to set up and maintain than shared hosting.
Passenger makes running Rails applications on shared hosting much better. Dreamhost, a major shared hosting provider, recently announced full support for Passenger. We tested a small Rails application on Dreamhost using it and we were impressed. It seemed to run without issues and with reasonable performance.
Deploying some Rails applications on shared hosting may soon become commonplace.
Thinking Ahead
Will better Rails deployment options or Rails on shared hosting mean it’s time to switch from PHP? No. It’s unlikely this blog will switch from WordPress anytime soon and Phusion’s own blog even runs on WordPress. There are many great PHP applications out there. More importantly, sometimes PHP will simply be a more appropriate solution.
PHP, Ruby, and Rails are all great tools you can choose from. You’ll still need to learn these tools, their relative strengths, and when it’s appropriate to apply each.
Passenger just means Rails deployment is getting simpler and more mature. It also means deploying PHP and Rails applications together on the same Apache instance is now much easier. These are more reasons to consider adding Rails to your toolbox. It’s certainly a great time to be building web applications.
