The Road to Passenger 3: Phusion Passenger Lite | Hacker News Reader

The Road to Passenger 3: Phusion Passenger Lite

blog.phusion.nl

62 pointsmudgemeister7 comments

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.

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)

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.

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.

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.

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.

Article says that Passenger Lite has nginx core. This probably means that it ships with preconfigured nginx and should be production-ready.

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