Moving my site into production mode - general questions

Hi!

I’ve just finished my ror site and i’d like to move it into production
mode.
Now it runs on linux/apache 1.3/cgi.

  1. Can i use fcgi in development mode? I’ve read somewhere that because
    of caching it causes memory leaks and fcgi shouldn’t generally be used
    in development. Does plain cgi also causes memory leaks in development
    mode?

  2. Does rails automatically delete its session files? If not how to set
    up cron to automatically delete session files that are i.e. 24h old?
    Does rails app with fcgi create any other temporary files that i should
    take care of?

  3. Is there good tutorial about caching in rails? What it is, how to use
    it, what can/should be cached, when to use it etc.

  4. Where to set RAILS_ENV to production mode? Is it ok if i set it in
    enviroment.rb or should i set it in .htaccess or httpd.conf? I’ve read
    that it’s not ‘clean’ way to set it inside enviroment.rb. Why?

  5. What are standard error pages in rails in production mode? How to
    modify them?

  6. Is there anything else that i should watch out for while moving my
    app into production?

Thanks in advance

szymek wrote:

Hi!

I’ve just finished my ror site and i’d like to move it into production
mode.
Now it runs on linux/apache 1.3/cgi.

  1. Can i use fcgi in development mode? I’ve read somewhere that because
    of caching it causes memory leaks and fcgi shouldn’t generally be used
    in development. Does plain cgi also causes memory leaks in development
    mode?

You shouldn’t have any problems with cgi in development mode because
your process die after each request. You can use fcgi in development
mode if you want. Just restart your processes often.

  1. Does rails automatically delete its session files? If not how to set
    up cron to automatically delete session files that are i.e. 24h old?
    Does rails app with fcgi create any other temporary files that i should
    take care of?

Rails does not automatically delete any temp/session files.

  1. Is there good tutorial about caching in rails? What it is, how to use
    it, what can/should be cached, when to use it etc.

The best tutorial I’ve seen is in the agile web devleopment book

  1. Where to set RAILS_ENV to production mode? Is it ok if i set it in
    enviroment.rb or should i set it in .htaccess or httpd.conf? I’ve read
    that it’s not ‘clean’ way to set it inside enviroment.rb. Why?

I set mine in envrioment.rb

  1. What are standard error pages in rails in production mode? How to
    modify them?

You can modify them in your .htaccess or you can actuall modify the
error pages in public

  1. Is there anything else that i should watch out for while moving my
    app into production?

Make sure you freeze your version of rails into your vendor folder if
you are on shared hosting

Thanks in advance

charlie
recentrambles.com

Thanks!

Regarding session files: if i don’t use sessions in my site, can i
somehow turn if off, so the files won’t be created or rails uses them
for something?

And what about log file? Should i also delete it or truncate it, if it
grows to big, or just leave it? Does it by default log only errors or
everything?

szymek wrote:

Thanks!

Regarding session files: if i don’t use sessions in my site, can i
somehow turn if off, so the files won’t be created or rails uses them
for something?

And what about log file? Should i also delete it or truncate it, if it
grows to big, or just leave it? Does it by default log only errors or
everything?

If you don’t explicitly create a session then there won’t be to worry
about. there is a shell script that comes with rails that will clean
out your logs. If you freeze rails into your vendor directory, you can
find it at vendor/rails/cleanlogs.sh

Charlie B.
www.recentrambles.com

You can also do conditional sessions like this:

session :off, :except => %w{foo bar}
OR
session :off, :only => %w{foo bar}

Cheers-
-Ezra

I’m assuming that foo and bar are controlers and that if you had
contollers in directorys that your could do

session :off, :except => ‘admin/private_stuff’

is that correct?

On Apr 8, 2006, at 4:24 PM, charlie bowman wrote:

everything?

If you don’t explicitly create a session then there won’t be to worry
about. there is a shell script that comes with rails that will clean
out your logs. If you freeze rails into your vendor directory, you
can
find it at vendor/rails/cleanlogs.sh

Charlie B.
www.recentrambles.com

Actually even if your app doesnt ever store anything in the sessions,
session files will still be created for every user. To turn off
sessions put the following in your application.rb inside the class
definition:

session :off

You can also do conditional sessions like this:

session :off, :except => %w{foo bar}
OR
session :off, :only => %w{foo bar}

Cheers-
-Ezra