Rails: is Passenger Standalone suitable for production deployment?

Question

The question title pretty much sums it up... I haven't been able to find any good resources that outline the pros / cons of using Phusion Passenger Standalone for Rails App Deployment. How does it compare to running Passenger Nginx or Passenger Apache? Do things like .htaccess continue to work as expected? Any insight would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks!

Answer 1

Standalone is built on top of Nginx. You can directly attach it to port 80 and it'll behave pretty much like Phusion Passenger + Nginx: it can serve static files very quickly, it'll automatically start and stop processes based on traffic, it'll auto-restart processes when they crash, it'll take care of fairly load balancing traffic between processes, etc. Performance-wise, it's exactly the same as Phusion Passenger for Nginx. So yes you can use it in production.

Nginx does not support .htaccess. It's an Apache thing.

If you run multiple Standalones it's a little bit more memory-heavy than running a single Phusion Passenger for Nginx but the overhead is relatively small.

Answer 2

The Passenger standalone is pretty much a Passenger with Nginx compiled in. One of the pros is, that you now can use a different Ruby version with each Passenger and proxy the traffic through one Apache or Nginx or use it, well, standalone. I don't know if there is a difference performance-wise. I suppose using multiple standalone Passengers instead of one Nginx with a Passenger module increases the memory usage.