Now on Passenger (mod_rails)

Well this is working out well so far. I'm really liking the Passenger (mod_rails for Apache) extension. Right now I have this Mephisto site running it and it seems to be doing really well. Also, most people do not do this, but I run a full development stack Apache/MongrelCluster to mimic production boxes the best way I can. Now I am running mod_rails on all my development hosts.

Some Things I Like

• I do not have to fuss with OS X launchd startup scripts for my mongrels, just Apache.
• Typically in a high volume site that runs mongrel behind an Apache proxy balancer, will get a large timeout and proxy error even if the mongrels are immediately available. Passenger has a nice way to restart the app, just touch the tmp/restart.txt file.

Some Things I'm Waiting For

• The RailsEnv can not be set per virtual host. You have to set RAILS_ENV = 'development' in each app if you want to run mixed virtual hosts with different environments.
• Normally I would pass environment variables to the console when issuing mongrel cluster starts. I would really love to see Passenger support apache environment variables.