Railsconf Europe 2007 Roundup 3 (rubyworks)

September 24, 2007 by alex

rubyworks is a full rails stack put together also by thoughtworks. this time it’s all open source. it features haproxy (supposed to be much faster and light weight than apache_mod_balancer) as load balancer, mongrel as application server, monit and runit for monitoring and controlling mongrel, mysql/postgrs/oracle ruby bindings for database connectivity and also bindings for ferret, libxml, hpricot and rmagick.

everything is nicely packaged as rpms and debian packages so it can easily be installed within 5 minutes (it really works). even better, the packages at the same time pretend to be ruby gems, so you can safely install other debian packages and gems that depend on one of the libraries provided by rubyworks.

now we had already set up a cluster of 6 servers for autoki with everything set up more or less perfectly so why would we need rubyworks? answer: to steal the config files for runit/monit and haproxy. our mongrel setup has always been a bit shaky, especially when it came to restarting the mongrels after a deployment. after using the rubyworks setup with runit now everything is stable. (btw runit can run and supervise any process in *nix and is ready to be the successor of the old init which is used by most linux distros to start up all the processes. one advantage is that it starts all processes at once instead of piece by piece, plus runit handles putting a process in the background and keeping it alive there, something mongrel is especially bad at).

This entry was posted on September 24, 2007 by alex.