Clogging up the Web

I have been meaning to get Rails setup on my home “server” for a while now. I finally got it running yesterday and I have to say that my initial impressions are very positive. Talk about hitting the ground running.

I got things going very quickly with a Ruby / Rails frontend and MySQL 5 backend. Using a “scaffold” I had a mini application running without writing any actual code. I just ran commands to create a model, a controller and the views.

More on developing applications later. For now, let me tell you about how I set it up. Rather than running the Rails / WEBrick server on it’s lonesome, I used Apache 2 to reverse proxy connections to Rails. This allows me to run many rails servers on many ports and use either sub-directories or virtual hosts (with subdomains) to map to the Rails applications. This is much faster and easier to setup than worrying about any loadable modules or fast-cgi. Using mod_proxy is a widely accepted method used in many production environments, so I don’t see any issues with that as a long-term solution.