Mongrel

Angel N. Sciortino

Copyright © 2006 O’Reilly Media, Inc.

Beijing • Cambridge • Farnham • Köln • Sebastopol • Tokyo

10 November 2006

Abstract

This shortcut teaches you how to use Mongrel, the new high-performance web application container for Rails. It starts with basic setup and installation, but goes well beyond the basics, showing you how to set up Mongrel clusters, how to use Mongrel behind Apache and other web servers, and more. Mongrel has given Rails developers a first-rate server. If you’ve suffered through Rails apps deployed on Apache or Lighttpd with FCGI, suffer no more! Start using Mongrel, and say good-bye to FCGI and all its problems.

Getting Started

What is Mongrel?

Mongrel is a web application container for Ruby on Rails. It is as simple to use as WEBrick for development, and robust enough to be used in a production environment. Mongrel includes a fast HTTP library that it uses instead of FastCGI or SCGI, which ends up making your Rails applications faster. It is framework agnostic and currently supports the Ruby On Rails, Og+Nitro, and Camping frameworks. This book focuses on using Mongrel with Ruby on Rails.

Mongrel runs on Windows and Unix-like systems. I will refer to the Unix-like systems as Unix for consistency’s sake. This includes Linux, BSD, OS X (which is BSD-based), Solaris, and any other Unix-based systems.

Mongrel is a mixture of Ruby and C. Because of this, ...