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Ease Rails deployments with Phusion Passenger

Posted by Robert Dempsey on 11. Apr, 2008 in Articles

Phusion, the Computer Science Company, released Phusion Passenger, a mod_rails for Apache which makes deployments of Rails applications easier....

Phusion, the Computer Science Company, released Phusion Passenger, a mod_rails for Apache which makes deployments of Rails applications easier. Passenger brings the PHP-style of deployment to Rails, upload their latest code and go. The Phusion site says that Passenger will automatically monitor Rails server processes thus lowering the need for systems administration. There are two flavors of license, free and enterprise. Install is super easy, and there is a video available along with a host of documentation.

Phusion Passenger does seem to lower the bar for deployment. At the same time, it increases the need to ensure that when you are ready to deploy, you have the latest code checked out from subversion ready to deploy. It also seems to require either the changing of a file (tmp/restart.txt) or a restart of Apache once you upload the latest. A quick perusal of the user documentation didn’t mention migrations, one of (IMO) the biggest strengths of Rails.

If anyone has experience deploying an application using Phusion Passenger please let us know how migrations are handled. We’ll be testing it out next week.

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  • I don't think you need to touch tmp/restart.txt with capistrano - when capistrano changes the symlink, the app seems to restart.
  • I spent a few hours testing Passenger when it was released and I was definitely impressed. Now I just need to make a decision on whether to go with the upcoming Deprec2 with mongrel/nginx or Passenger with apache. Decisions, decisions...

    Either way, I'm very happy with push for better deployment options. It gives companies less reasons to oppose using Rails :)
  • Database migrations are not affected by Phusion Passenger (mod_rails). Passenger really only affects the deployment process, and as some have mentioned, your capistrano recipes need to be modified (i.e. for the better actually, after all, less lines of code are needed -> less error prone -> more time and sanity to spend with your spouse ;-) ).

    Hope this has answered your question.

    Cheers (we're actually trying to have a drink already people, leave us alone! haha, nah just kidding, keep on blogging people :-) )

    Hongli Lai
    Ninh Bui
    - Phusion.nl
  • Justin Blake
    Yep, capistrano would handle the migrations just fine, and making it do a "touch tmp/restart.tx" as the restart task should be easy enough. This looks really cool, but I still need to look into it more to figure out what's actually happening under the hood...
  • I haven't tried it yet, but capistrano should work fine with this. When it's done deploying the updated code you can make capistrano fire up your migrations and restart apache for you.
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