Best practices for new Rails deployments on Linux?
I switched from Mongrel Cluster to Passenger two weeks ago (Debian Linux Server). I didn't look back for a second. Passenger is probably the easiest way to get your new server up and running. Performance and reliability are reasonable too.
Personally, I like to spend my time working on exciting new Rails projects rather than dealing with deployment issues - Passenger enables me to do exactly that. However, Mongrel or something else may still be preferable if you have some kind special requirements (doesn't apply for most products).
This morning, DHH talks about this very topic on his own blog:
But somehow the message of Passenger has been a little slow to sink in. There's already a ton of big sites running off it. Including Shopify, MTV, Geni, Yammer, and we'll be moving over first Ta-da List shortly, then hopefully the rest of the 37signals suite quickly thereafter.
So while there are still reasons to run your own custom multi-tier setup of manually configured pieces, just like there are people shying away from mod_php for their particulars, I think we've finally settled on a default answer. Something that doesn't require you to really think about the first deployment of your Rails application. Something that just works out of the box. Even if that box is a shared host!
http://www.loudthinking.com/posts/30-myth-1-rails-is-hard-to-deploy
Tobias Lütke on the topic of switching Shopify (million requests/day) to Passenger:
All this means that the total amount of memory that is used by Shopify during normal operations went from average of 9GB to an average of 5GB. We evenly distributed the savings amongst more Shopify processes and more memcached space which moved our average response time from 210ms to 130ms while traffic grew 30% in the last few months.
In conclusion: I cannot see any reason to choose a different deployment strategy at this point. Its simple, complete, fast and well documented.
We've been using the old standard nginx -> mongrel stack for the last 18 months, and although it was not trivial to set up the first time around, it's proven flexible, and has dealt with some very high traffic sites for us. Nginx in particular has been absolutely rock solid and fast, and if you can get your app page-caching you can deal with a lot of requests.
Stuck mongrels have been an issue, so we use monit to kill them when they misbehave. Again, it was not totally trivial to set up, but we've used the same process on many many sites at this point.
We haven't played with passenger yet, so perhaps it's easier and more stable, I'll defer to the other responders on that one, all I can say is that there's no reason at all you can't build a solid stack with nginx and mongrel.