Are you afraid of using ROR for developing web applications due to the difficult and time consuming deployment on Apache? Have you been using Mongrel and Thin for deploying your Ruby on Rails applications and want to try something new and more efficient?

The Ruby gem Phusion Passenger, a new open source application is the answer to most of your problems related to the deployment of ROR applications on Apache. By using this application, it’ll take a matter of minutes to deploy your Ruby on Rails applications on Apache, unlike ever before. Absolute speed is not the only capability of Phusion Passenger. It also provides ease of use, low maintenance and high stability. Let’s have a look at the short description of Phusion Passenger as provided by Ray Cheung in his post:

Ray Cheung has drawn attention to a very powerful aspect of Passenger - it follows DRY convention even though it is flexible enough to use at the same time. Phusion Passenger’s latest version is a minor release with non-intrusive bug fixes and optimizations. According to studies, Phusion Passenger is proven to be much better than Mongrel and Thin in many aspects.

• Deployment is fast and easy. No ROR-specific configurations are required.
•  Phusion Passenger in combination with Ruby Enterprise Edition is more efficient in terms of memory.
• Most of the errors are recovered automatically. This means less management on server side.
• Documentation is well presented for both system administrators and developers.
• Phusion Passenger supports different Ruby frameworks like Merb and Camping via Rack.
• Online support is available in the form of blog and discussion groups.
• The application is open source so users can contribute to the documentation and other information through the online editable wiki.

Phusion Passenger is even better than mod_ruby, and that is shown by the fact that nobody prefers to use mod_ruby for production. Also, mod_ruby hasn’t been updated for a long time, so it’s more likely to contain bugs and other limitations. It has been proven from the results of many tests conducted on Phusion Passenger that it is the best deployment solution available right now for RoR applications. It’s even better in performance and time consumption than Mongrel and Thin as depicted by the graph here.

If you’re interested in learning about the working of Phusion Passenger, its installation and the deployment of ROR applications on Apache using Passenger, then you can learn it all from the screencast created by Ryan Bates from Railscasts.

References:

http://www.webappers.com/2008/08/27/phusion-passenger-ruby-apps-easy-deployment-on-apache/

http://blog.phusion.nl/

www.modrails.com