Yesterday I decided to give Phusion Passenger aka mod_rails a try and installed it. It was dead simple to set it up and to deploy rails applications with it. I’m now using it for several “small” applications, for which the whole overhead of setting up a cluster of mongrels and a proxy doesn’t seem to be adequate. I’ll give you a short summary on how to install mod_rails for apache2 on Debian Etch.
Typing SSH passwords again and again can be a real pain. For example:
Lately I started to use Capistrano to deploy
my rails applications. If I want to set up the maintenance-page on the
server I’ll type cap deploy:web:disable which of course
prompts me for the SSH password. Then I want to deploy my application
with cap deploy and again will be prompted for the
password. Finally I have to cap deploy:web:enable to remove
the maintenance page which as mindful readers might have guessed
already prompts for the password. This was just one reason for me to
set up SSH authentication keys. At first I was a little worried that
setting it up might be a bit complicated. Luckily I was disabused. If
you want to switch to key based authentication too follow these simple
steps.
This short tutorial is going to show how to set up Lighttpd with fastcgi on Debian 4.0 (Etch). Actually it’s nothing special but I hope it demonstrates how easy it is. ;-)