On 10/31/06, Sam Livingston-Gray <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
My (admittedly quite limited) understanding is that Apache doesn't serve Rails apps itself, but it can act as a reverse proxy (see also: pound), dispatching requests to, e.g., dispatch.fcgi or mongrel. I believe Dreamhost does this with Apache fronting for FCGI.
FastCGI and reverse HTTP proxying are both valid options, though the FastCGI module for Apache doesn't have the greatest reputation for stability.
As I recall, Textdrive has you set up a lighttpd instance on some dedicated port, and then uses Apache's proxying capabilities to forward HTTP requests on 80 to your lighttpd port, and then lighttpd asks one or more dispatch.fcgi instances to process that request. Seems excessively layered to me, but I'm sure there's a reason, probably so you can run PHP alongside, or do virtual hosting with Apache, or something...
Precisely -- one Textdrive system probably hosts a few dozen user domains, so they use Apache as a secure and stable front-end, and just proxy requests to each backend account's own lighttpd instance. That also allows them to give individual hosting customers privileges to maintain administer "their" lighttpd instance (to restart, switch RAILS_ENV settings, etc.), without being able to break other customers' setups if they screw up. (Mongrel is a much nicer solution to this, IMHO, since it removes the whole lighttpd layer of the stack without incurring the performance problems that WEBrick brings with it.) -Lennon _______________________________________________ PDXRuby mailing list [email protected] IRC: #pdx.rb on irc.freenode.net http://lists.pdxruby.org/mailman/listinfo/pdxruby
