Ruby on Rails and Mongrel with Apache 2.2 Aug 9, 01:39 AM

Beware those who are not Rails geeks who enter here:

So I decided to turn left off of the highway of FCGI onto a “scenic route” called Mongrel on the map. This is probably more for my personal knowledge than yours, but I had a few issues. See my server runs DirectAdmin, which is a shiny account/hosting server app. I used DirectAdmin’s scripts to compile Apache 2.2.3 in all of its sparkling glory, however the first few times I forgot to build it with all shared modules enabled.

Well… its working now and Mongrel is nice. I just ran siege on it and it passed with flying colors with a cluster of two Mongrels running the site. What ended up happening with Apache is that I didn’t have the modules compiled, and then when I did I needed to include mod_proxy, mod_proxy_http, and mod_proxy_balancer in the httpd.conf file. I also kept forgetting the ProxyPass and ProxyPassReverse directive which I stuck inside the VirtualHost directive of the domain that was hosted. This way I could setup the Proxy on a per-domain basis.

Now I’ll just need to figure out the rails plugin that allows me to make the app aware that it’s being proxied through a directory (i.e. coolsite.com/proxied_app/). Most of the apps running on the server are small hastily constructed things which reside in directories because they’re too small/cheap to even bother with a real domain name.

P.S. I’m thinking I’d like to setup a blog on Futuremint.com for this sort of techy crap. Then I can rant all about Subarus, Mountains, and politics over here.