How You Can Help The State of Ruby Webapp Deployment In The Next 5 Minutes

By Peter Cooper / February 18, 2009

[画像:passengerlogo.png]Can you remember what a hideous chore it was to deploy Ruby-based apps (Rails apps being a key example) before early 2008? FastCGI, proxying schemes, plain old CGI - it was all a bit of a mess. It was so bad, in fact, that in January 2008 we posted No True "mod_ruby" Is Damaging Ruby's Viability On The Web and kicked off a major discussion about it (115 comments!)

A couple of months later, an as-then unknown Dutch company called Phusion (headed by Ninh Bui and Hongli Lai) released mod_rails (a.k.a. Passenger), an Apache module that automatically handles server processes for Ruby apps and makes it a snap (just upload and touch a file) to deploy any Rack-based Ruby webapp with Apache - everyone has benefitted, including Sinatra, Merb and Ramaze development.

Phusion is now looking for help. They're a company but they essentially give away their two main products: Passenger and Ruby Enterprise Edition. You can pay for an "enterprise license" but it's really just a donation system. Now they're looking to specifically raise 14,000ドル to get the next version of Passenger out of the door. They're promising a lot - extended documentation, improved support and security, finalized Ruby 1.9 support, and, heck, too much to count.

They have just 8,336ドル to go and if you want to help push forward the state of deploying Ruby-powered webapps, click here to donate (or read more about what they're achieving). All donors will be credited.

P.S. In May 2008, we ran 28 mod_rails / Passenger Resources to Help You Deploy Rails Applications Faster that you might like to revisit.

P.P.S. Update: Ruddy 'eck - it's only 24 hours on and it's down to just 2854ドル.70 to go.. nice one guys!

Comments

Sho says:
February 18, 2009 at 8:25 pm
Phusion's business model:

1. make a popular apache mod
2. give it away
3. hope that someone takes notice and gives you a job
4. they don't
5. hold your userbase at ransom while you beg for 14,000ドル worth of paypal donations
6. ????
7. PROFIT!!!!!!!
Peter Cooper says:
February 18, 2009 at 8:36 pm
It's pretty much guaranteed they'll be releasing the next version whether they raise the 14ドルk or not ;-) I'm just hyping it up because I think they deserve it.
Hongli Lai says:
February 18, 2009 at 8:45 pm
@Sho: Nothing is being held "ransom". If you look at the commit logs you'll see that we're writing documentation while the campaign is running.
lolcatz says:
February 18, 2009 at 8:46 pm
Well, yes. They deserve it!

Nevertheless, debgem sucks ass... which is sad.
Hongli Lai says:
February 18, 2009 at 8:55 pm
@lolcatz: If have constructive criticism about Debgem then we'd be very much interested in hearing them.
George McGrumble says:
February 18, 2009 at 10:46 pm
Well Sho might be one of those people for whom around every silver lining is a dark cloud. I'm going to make my donation in his name.
Scott Becker says:
February 18, 2009 at 11:46 pm
Hongli Lai - Ignore the anonymous trolls, Phusion does excellent work and it shows. But you knew that. :)
lolcatz says:
February 19, 2009 at 7:00 am
Crap, that was troll in me. My apologies.
Morgan Roderick says:
February 19, 2009 at 7:30 am
Peter, thanks for turning our attention to this :-)
Grzegorz Daniluk says:
February 19, 2009 at 10:15 am
Phusion guys absolutely deserve to get paid for their excellent job.
cbmeeks says:
February 19, 2009 at 1:39 pm
I'm using Phusion (mod_rails) and I love it. One thing that put me off on Rails a year or more ago was messing with Mongrels. I always thought that was insane. Especially since I came from the PHP world where setting up a PHP server takes all of 2 minutes.

@Hongli Lai
You will be getting a donation from me tonight. It won't be much due to financial constraints (private school is EXPENSIVE) but it should be something.

Great job.
Brazen says:
February 20, 2009 at 5:46 pm
I'm not using passenger yet. I still like using mongrels, and I'm holding out until passenger will render single rhtml files the way php will render a single php file, but with out the problems and lack of development of mod_ruby (no offense to shugo).
Peter Cooper says:
February 20, 2009 at 5:56 pm
Brazen: Without actually doing it, it would be pretty easy to rig that up, I'd think. Passenger will serve anything Rack-wise, and you could write a Rack middleware in a handful of lines to do basic ERB rendering. It'd make a cool blog post actually..
pjammer says:
February 28, 2009 at 2:21 pm
Peter, good article. I've been using passenger on my own VPS since August and if it wasn't for passenger, i'd still be trying to figure out mongrels and mongrel_clusters!
Also peter, are you able to write an article or point out the differences between using passanger and mongrel_clusters? I've not looked into it, but why did we hear so much about needing mongrel_clusters about a year - 2 years ago, to now, we only need passanger? Would passanger ever need to be clustered? Simply an idea/question that i don't know how to answer, thought you may want to run with it.

Hongli Lai - you guys do amazing work, and as many have said @#$% those that troll and tell you 'not to profit from it'. I don't see why you can't offer support, ala redhat model, or even better would be to charge for a ruby enterprise and passanger stack. just my two cents.

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