Towards a Fedora Ruby appserver

Hi, one of the great things about Ruby webapps is the many, many options you have to deploy them. Besides choosing a web server, as a developer you also get to choose a Rails or Sinatra version, and to pick your favorite rack or Rails plugin(s). The downside of all this is that it's a crazy duplication of work, and following all your choices, you might discover that the versions of some of your plugins conflict with rubygem-* RPM's in Fedora. To make all this easier, it would be great if we could come up with the Grand Useful Fedora Ruby Appserver (yes, GUFRA ;). I see this whole effort consisting of two parts: * discuss the tradeoffs at each level of the stack and come up with a recommendation for what we like (hopefully some document on the Wiki) * package whatever needs to be packaged for Fedora The end result should make it easier for budding Ruby web developers to start with a well-tested set of tools, rather than have to go and figure all this out for themselves. And, of course, packages for all these things in F15. To kick this off, here's what I think belongs into GUFRA: * Ruby interpreter * frontend webserver * Ruby webserver * Rails and Sinatra * Rack plugins (which ones ?) * Rails plugins (which ones ?) * Devtools (rspec, rinari, ...) Some thoughts on the tradeoffs: Ruby interpreter ================ Only MRI seems practical for now, and there the big question is whether we'll make the switchover to 1.9.x in F15, and how. Frontend webserver ================== Frontrunners are probably httpd and nginx. Apache httpd is hte Swiss army knife, nginx is more limited, but people like how easy it is to configure. Ruby webserver ============== Mostly passenger vs. thin vs. unicorn. Passenger has the advantage that it can be loaded as a module into httpd, but packaging it has proven somewhat interesting. OTOH, thin and unicorn are a nightmare to manage, since you get to babysit a good number of processes, and can't take advantage of httpd's ability to spin threads up and down depending on load. Rails ===== For F15, the big question is whether to go with 3.0.x or the latest 2.3.x. And that mostly depends on whether people's favorite plugins are available for Rails 3. As a sidenote, we'll also have to worry about Bundler, since that's what people are told to use for their Rails3 apps; Bundler doesn't play nice with RPM. Plugins ======= Mostly an exercise in collecting people's favorite plugins, and making sure they are in F15, in the right version. David