

The Road to Passenger 3: Phusion Passenger Lite - mudgemeister
http://blog.phusion.nl/2010/07/01/the-road-to-passenger-3-technology-preview-3-closing-the-gap-between-development-and-production-rethinking-the-word-easy/

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davidw
Good explanation of the differences between Passenger and something like
Mongrel. To me, the ability to dynamically start and stop processes is what
makes Passenger such a clear winner for what I do with it.

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SingAlong
Just read the post. It confuses me a bit. It's mentioned in the beginning that
the Lite version is a replacement for the local dev server. But later on in
the post he emphasizes that it can also be used in production.

 _On the other hand, if you need integration into the web server, then Phusion
Passenger for Apache/Nginx is for you_

Can anyone throw some light on the difference between using
[Apache/Nginx]+Passenger and just Passenger Lite in the production
environment? Why would I want to use a web server when Passenger Lite does
what I require (serve the ruby app and also serve static files)

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TrevorBurnham
Several reasons: You might want to run other (possibly non-Ruby) apps on the
same server; you might want to tweak settings, like the headers for certain
files, to improve performance; you might want to do some URL mapping at the
web server level; and you might simply want better static file serving
performance (nginx is very, very fast).

That last point isn't an issue here because Passenger Lite has an "nginx
core." So if you can configure that core, then the only reason you wouldn't
want to use Passenger Lite in production is if you have non-Ruby apps you want
to run on the same server.

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thibaut_barrere
I know it's not planned (I asked them!), but for many small apps, it would be
great to have a simple flag to tell Passenger "I need 1 worker (delayed_job,
resque) for this app, please keep one alive", vs running monit or similar.

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helium
While I think that Passenger Lite might be useful for development, I would
think twice about deploying my production app without a full blown web server,
just for the sake of being able to run non-ruby code if needed.

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angelbob
You could deploy it as a sibling process rather than a child. I would never
deploy Passenger Lite really by itself -- I'd use god (like monit, but in
Ruby) to run it, even if it's just one process. So making that two processes,
one non-ruby, is easy.

