Good news for Ruby on Rails users Apr 11, 2008

Phusion Passenger has been released.

Basically, Passenger is mod_rails for Apache.  It acts like mod_php or mod_perl and lets you easily set up and execute Rails applications straight from Apache.  Passenger keeps a "pool" of Ruby instances running at all times and dynamically starts and stops them based on demand.  It also is quite intelligent about detecting deployment problems and giving you the information you need to fix them.

For those who don't run their own Rails servers, you're probably wondering why this matters.  It's traditionally been near-impossible to find good Rails web hosting without administering your own server, because Rails acts as an application server as opposed to an embedded set of scripts like PHP.  That's why I switched from Dreamhost, a shared hosting provider that I like and happily recommend, to Linode, a virtual private server provider that I also like and happily recommend, but who costs me 3 times as much as Dreamhost did.

Now that Passenger is out, it's a different game.  Shared web hosting providers can much more easily integrate Rails into their setups.  Running Passenger is still more resource-intensive than running, say, mod_php, but because of the demand-based pool, it's vastly more efficient than using individual Mongrel instances for each Rails app.

I'm currently testing Passenger on my web server.  If it's as good as people are saying, I definitely won't be going back.