Ruby on Rails Nightmare
I've just about completed my first Ruby on Rails based application. Coding it was like a dream. I honestly enjoyed working with the framework and the speed at which I was able to put things together.
However, once I went to deploy it to another server that was running Apache I ran into problems. I spent two solid days trying to get things working and I finally gave up. The server was running Linux Fedora 3, Apache 2, and I was trying to get SSL working with it as well. I installed FastCGI with no apparent problems. However, when I tried to access the application itself the FastCGI process kept crashing. I tried just using WebRick but the SSL support for that is beyond me.
I ended up using Proxypass from the Apache instance on my Linux box to my Windows server that I already setup for development. I had to disable my SSL redirects that I had configured in the application because for some reason they caused endless looping of those requests. It is slow right now without FastCGI or mod_ruby but until I'm done testing that is were it will live. I'm hoping that one of those Ruby on Rails hosting companies will know better than me.
All and all the experience of using Ruby on Rails was great but the experience of deploying it to another server was a nightmare. My tolerance for pain is pretty high. I'm not sure how quickly RoR will be adopted by newbies if what I experienced was typical.
January 4th, 2006 at 3:52 pm
Try checking the config items in parts 3 and 4 of this tutorial. It shows some of the common gotchas when moving a Rails app to Apache:
http://www.tonyarnold.com/articles/2005/08/10/rolling-with-ruby-on-rails-on-mac-os-x-tiger-for-beginners
January 4th, 2006 at 5:47 pm
Thanks Dan!
I’ve spend a lot of time searching for references to solve my problems. This is not one I’ve seen before. I’ll check it out.
January 6th, 2006 at 7:05 am
Well, so, the move to another box took two days? I have lost count of the days I have spent trying to get invidivual “features” of the J2EE puzzle working! And then layer on the the various third party add-ons: Hibernate, Spring, DBCP, Ant, Maven, etc. I have lost a good portion of my life to Java setup!
May 25th, 2006 at 11:17 am
I’m having a very similar experience with rails. It seems like it is great for development but the options for deploying a production system are slim, buggy, and not well documented. Seems like most people hyping it up are just running it on mac books. I hope this situation is fixed soon because it would be a shame to have it lose momentum due to this.
Alex.
June 11th, 2006 at 9:50 pm
Use Lighttpd instead…
I’ve tried installing RoR on my WAMP development machine and it crawls too. Haven’t tried on a Linux box yet… but will prob use Lighttpd instead of Apache for that.
August 29th, 2007 at 9:12 pm
I think it has nothing to do with the rails integration itself with apache, fastcgi, lighttpd, etc per se but the newness and the absence of community collective mass where most of the common issues like production grade deployment should have been solved or encountered and resolved.
I haven’t tried deploying to production yet and may encounter the same soo once I decided to put up one. I wish the Mongrel app server developer should have developed a production grade app server before leaving IT. Mongrel setup involves just 2 simple steps and undeploy – 1 step
June 24th, 2008 at 1:03 am
Grails, gentlement, Grails. Yeah, these posts are a little old but deploying Grails is a dream.