Rails: Is a stand-alone passenger suitable for production deployment?

Question

The title of the question pretty much sums up ... I could not find any good resources that describe the pros and cons of using the standalone Phusion Passenger application to deploy Rails applications. How does this compare with the launch of Passenger Nginx or Passenger Apache? Something like .htaccess continue to work as expected? Any understanding would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks!

Answer 1

Standalone built on top of Nginx. You can directly connect it to port 80, and it will behave just like Phusion Passenger + Nginx: it can quickly load static files, it automatically starts and stops processes based on traffic, it automatically restarts processes when they crash, it will take care of fair load balancing between processes, etc. In performance, this is exactly the same as Phusion Passenger for Nginx. So yes, you can use it in production.

Nginx does not support .htaccess. This is the Apache thing.

If you run several standalone systems, this is slightly more than memory than running one Phusion Passenger for Nginx, but the overhead is relatively small.

Answer 2

A Standalone Passenger is pretty much a Passenger with Nginx compiled. One of the pluses is that now you can use a different version of Ruby with each Passenger and proxy server traffic through one Apache or Nginx or use it offline as well. I don’t know if there is a difference in performance. I believe that using multiple standalone Passengers instead of a single Nginx with Passenger module increases memory usage.