My setup: Rails 2.3.10, Ruby 1.8.7 on Windows
The last time I deployed a Rails app from Windows to Linux on Slicehost, I used Capistrano, Nginx, Mongrel, and SVN. That was 3 years ago, fast forward to now, I'm still on Windows for development and is now looking to deploy to EC2. A quick search turns up tools like Rubber and Chef which aren't easy to grasp with a quick read. It seems like Rubber and Chef are designed for multi-EC2 instances deployment which will be useful when I need to scale.
I'm also new to Passenger but it seems to be the default way to deploy Rails app nowadays, one thing that isn't so clear to me is whether Passenger is a replacement for Mongrel? In my old setup, I configured Nginx to forward the Rails requests to a cluster of Mongrel processes but I don't see anything like that for Passenger.
Any insights are much appreciated.
We use something like what you're describing for our production server: EC2 + Apache + Passenger. We haven't had any need to use the fancy deployment tools you describe - plain old Capistrano (plus capistrano-ext so we can use it for multiple environments) does the job just fine. I've looked at Rubber (not Chef), but deemed it needlessly automagical and too poorly documented, and I'm really not sure what it offers that can't be done just as well with roles in Capistrano.
Passenger has been great. It's an "overseer" that manages a collection of Mongrel-like workers (I had thought that the workers were Mongrels, but upon further reading, I don't think they are. The Passenger comparisons page even compares its RPS to a Mongrel cluster, so...), starting them up as needed, culling them under low loads, restarting them if they crash, etc. It's actually very similar to the Server + Mongrel Cluster you described, but probably a bit better, as Passenger has an understanding of the underlying workers that Nginx / Apache don't. And you'll have to make a few minor tweaks to get Capistrano playing nicely with Passenger.
And if possible, pair Passenger with Ruby Enterprise Edition (from the same guys who made Passenger). It's a much faster version of Ruby, mostly due to a rewritten, configurable garbage collector. You'll have to tune your GC settings to get the most out of it.
Hope this helps!
Both might help:
http://ginzametrics.com/deploy-rails-app-to-ec2-with-rubber.html
Hosting rails on ec2
Rubystack allows you to have the same Rails environment for development on Windows and for deployment on Linux. We also have EC2 images (scroll to the bottom) and it is completely free, so you may want to give it a try.
Also, this may not work for you, but depending on your requirements, you may want to go for a PaaS solution like Heroku
Related
I have been playing around and evaluating other options to rails' default WEBrick server and Thin was the most painless and clean thing which worked very well!!
which one of these Mongrel, Thin, WEBrick and Passenger would you recommend and why..?
are there any scalability perks(cluster friendly or configs which can handle some sort of scale) which come with any of these servers.. or should scalability even be a parameter while evaluating them?
Dipak already answered half of your question but let me clarify on things a little bit. (I am one of the Phusion Passenger authors.)
WEBrick is a toy web server. Nobody uses it in anything but development because it performs poorly and is said to leak memory.
You said Thin worked well. Have you already set it up in a reverse proxy configuration? Because that's what people do in production scenarios. It is not safe to expose Thin (or Mongrel, or Unicorn) directly to the Internet.
You may be interested in reading Ruby on Rails server options and the Phusion Passenger architectural overview for more etailed explanations.
When it comes to scalability, there's not much difference. They all perform very similar in production, they all scale in about the same way, and any problems you encounter will most likely to be caused by your app or by Rails. Well, except for WEBrick, which you really shouldn't use in production. You may see difference in hello world benchmarks, but that will be all. In production use most of the time will be spent in the app so any minor speed differences visible in hello world benchmarks will become completely invisible.
There are some subtleties to be aware of though.
Phusion Passenger provides a feature called global queuing. It solves a specific problem, explained in detail in the manual. By default Nginx and Apache proxies requests in a round-robin manner so they suffer from this problem, while Phusion Passenger does not. There are ways to get around this when not using Phusion Passenger but they require specific configuration or the installation of additional web server modules.
The I/O model may or may not be important depending on the nature of your application. Mongrel, Thin, Unicorn, they are all multi-process single-threaded. This works great for traditional web apps which looks up stuff in the local database and renders something, but sucks majorly for apps which perform a lot of HTTP API calls or otherwise have to wait a lot on I/O. Why Rails 4 Live Streaming is a Big Deal explains this in detail.
Phusion Passenger is also multi-process single-threaded, but Phusion Passenger Enterprise supports multithreading. Phusion Passenger Enterprise is a commercial variant of the open source Phusion Passenger, with a variety of features useful for large-scale production environments.
In large production environments, some features become important, e.g. rolling restarts, not showing anything wrong when a deployment failed, etc. Mongrel, Thin, Unicorn, Phusion Passenger, they all expose these features to some degree, but some require more admin effort than others. For example to implement rolling restarts in Mongrel and Thin, you need quite a lot of steps in your deployment scripts. Unicorn doesn't require as many steps, but still significantly. This is where Phusion Passenger Enterprise shines: it takes all these features and turn them into a single config option. Turn the option on and the software takes care of the rest.
So, pick whatever option you think is best for your scenario.
The easiest to set up for production will probably be Apache and mod_rails (passenger). If you want to be using the new hotness, you could give nginx and passenger a whirl.
For development mongrel is usually the easiest to work with. Most Windows IDE's (RadRails, Netbeans) give you the choice to use Webrick or Mongrel for development work and let you control the servers from the IDE itself.
Update
Four Choices
There are really four choices, well, plus WEBrick, but that would be an unusual choice for a production server. Approximately in order of increasing complexity...
nginx + Mongrel
nginx + Passenger
Apache + Mongrel
Apache + Passenger
(There is Phusion Passenger Standalone, but that's really an nginx + passenger compiled together, so I'm not counting it, although it may be a good option for some people.)
A larger site may then add specialized layer 7 hardware (NetScaler, F5, ...) in front of the servers.
Thin is as easy as gem 'thin' for development and production
I must configure my RoR vps hosting for my rails app, but on my localmachine i simple use webrick...
Are any ways to do this on server, so that it will be faster, and also, if it reboot's or memory down, or something that call's shutdown of server, then it automatically starts?
Also how about rails enterprise?
Now i have clean ubuntu server, and rvm on it
Follow this tutorial, it's great for beginner and will answer all your questions: http://coding.smashingmagazine.com/2011/06/28/setup-a-ubuntu-vps-for-hosting-ruby-on-rails-applications-2/
Which webserver to use depends on many things. Among others, there's Thin, Unicorn, Rainbows, Puma, and counting.
I suggest you look on google (or even here, I'm pretty this was answered before) for comparisons between ruby webservers, so that you can know what situation each of them are adapted to, and which one will fit your needs best.
For production deployment you need to install nginx or apache,
nginx is lightweight ,consider installing nginx,
Now there are various ways simple and easy to install is passenger with nginx
Or simply you can use nginx+unicorn or nginx+thin you can find various article just google it.
What is the best deployment environment for a RoR app? Someone has suggested Unicorn but am not sure. Any suggestions?
Update:
well, i have a small app with just 3-4 pages and will be accessed by not more than 25-50 concurrent users. "best" here means, ease of deployment of the app and ease of maintenance of the environment itself. Obviously stability of the solution matters as well
You should try passenger standalone, it uses nginx under the hoods and is lightning fast with little configuration. Especially when you use many apps on one server, with different gemsets and ruby versions.
Even using nginx under the hoods, you can still choose apache or nginx to maintain your webservers domains using sockets.
read this article:
http://blog.phusion.nl/2010/09/21/phusion-passenger-running-multiple-ruby-versions/
In terms of ease of deployment and maintenance.
Then its hard to beat Phusion Passenger.
It appears as an apache or nginx mod.
I always go for the apache mod
as I prefer to have apache installed from apt,
and I find it easier to do version upgrade.
It can be installed as simply as;
gem install passenger
passenger-install-apache2-module
And from then on the install process will tell you exactly what to do.
I develop on a Mac, and I'm pretty comfortable setting up an Ubuntu VM with Apache installed, so "you don't need to install Apache" is not really a reason. I run Ruby from the VM anyway, so there doesn't seem to be much difference in system resources needed.
In my head, the advantage of using Apache is that it's going to perform more consistently with my production server.
So what reasons are there to use WEBrick? Does it make development easier somehow?
No there are no advantages. The only "advantage" is that it is the pre-bundled webserver so you at least "have something"
I'm sure most experienced Ruby devs use something else like thin, mongrel, unicorn, pow, passenger, etc...
I'd go for phusion passenger + passsenger pref pane: http://www.fngtps.com/2008/06/putting-the-pane-back-into-deployment
Awesomeness. This way I can act more like the production server and take it easy when adding new projects etc.
I've been using Rails for a school project, and I find the colorized logs helpful when I'm trying to figure out what the server is doing. Sure you could tail -f the apache logs, but color is nice IMO.
When I started my first bigger Rails application, I chose to use Apache (with Passenger), because I already had some experience with it with PHP, but I don't have any deep knowledge of deploying Rails applications.
How would one choose web server for a Rails app?
Are there any main differences between Apache and Mongrel?
Or is it just a matter of taste?
As you know, two popular setups are:
Apache + passenger
Apache + mongrel (Apache sending requests to your mongrel cluster)
Yes, It is a matter of taste.
You made the good choice with Passenger for your first app as it is far easier to setup.
It is the #1 recommended option on ROR official Website.
Performance is also very good.
Using mongrel is still a good option but it is harder to setup and administrate.
You will need to make sure you are running your rails app against a cluster of mongrel and not only one mongrel instance (for performance/concurrent request reason). Meaning adminstration of your apache + administration of your mongrels.
There is no reason to use mongrel.
The reason you see lots of sites/tutorials using mongrel is.. it was a good choice before Passenger.
Passenger is better on the performance side, dead easy to install and no (for the 90% cases) managing is required.
You can also do Nginx + Mongrel cluster. (I don't recommend it though.) Go with Phusion Passenger. It's pretty easy to setup and it's fast. No reason not to use it.
I use Passenger with Nginx. Besides just the web server, also look into using Ruby Enterprise Edition. It's going to save you a good amount of memory. ~30%. Ruby Enterprise Edition.