Ruby Forum Ruby on Rails > basic question: why mongrel (or webrick) ?

Hi there,

A newbie question:

Why a separate server - mongrel or webrick to be used when apache with
a mod_ruby (not sure if this exists) could have done the job.

thanks

-Prasad

First off I'm guessing you're coming from PHP and the whole mod_php
thing. That's cool, nothing at all wrong with that. In fact if you
want a similar deployment scheme with Ruby on Rails you can get the
low-down on it here:

http://www.modrails.com/

However, this is not the only way to deploy a Rails application. In
fact many people aren't even using Apache as the front-end web server,
so a mod_rails doesn't even make sense in those cases. In fact for
smallish in-house kind of stuff you could use straight up Mongrel,
Thin, or whatever without having an Apache front-end at all.

I found this blog post, it seems a little out-of-date given some of
the newer options like Thin and Passenger (mod_rails), but it looks
like a pretty good introduction to the world of options available for
hosting Rails applications:
http://blog.codahale.com/2006/06/19/time-for-a-grown-up-server-rails-mongrel-apache-capistrano-and-you/

Hope that helps.