Should I use Passenger for development?

Rails
1

Hi,

I will deploy my sites with Passenger.
I develop on windows with Instantrails so I should now use vmware if I
want to have passenger also used during development. But is it really
needed? Does it make much difference if I use Passenger or not for the
development environment?

Thanks.

2

I will deploy my sites with Passenger.
I develop on windows with Instantrails so I should now use vmware if I
want to have passenger also used during development. But is it really
needed? Does it make much difference if I use Passenger or not for the
development environment?

I don’t use Passenger in development. I’m running osx, but that
doesn’t matter. I can’t think of a reason to run passenger in
development…

3

Thanks Philip, I had the same impression and wanted to check with
others.
I would probably give it a try if I had OSX to get familiar with it. I
am SOOOOOOOO frustated with Vista that I might go for a Mac at some
point…

I do not feel like setting all the environment on ubuntu via vmware
right now.

Regards

4

On Sun, Aug 30, 2009 at 11:17 AM, Philip H.[email protected]
wrote:

I will deploy my sites with Passenger.
I develop on windows with Instantrails so I should now use vmware if I
want to have passenger also used during development. But is it really
needed? Does it make much difference if I use Passenger or not for the
development environment?

I don’t use Passenger in development. I’m running osx, but that
doesn’t matter. I can’t think of a reason to run passenger in
development…

Passenger absolutely rocks for development, particularly when you work
on multiple apps.

Add some local domains like yourapp.test to /etc/hosts. Then anytime
you want to hit your app, just load it in the browser. No fiddling
with starting/stopping mongrels. Plus, stuff like concurrent Ajax
requests will actually work.

To go one step further with this convenience, set up dnsmasq and map
*.test (or whatever top-level domain you want for local development)
to 127.0.0.1. Then you can do stuff like subdomain-based accounts
without adding every one to your /etc/hosts.

This setup is awesome for designers, too. Everyone on your team has
the full app running locally with no fuss, so they can work on view
code and CSS and see the results live. The way it should be.

I can’t recommend this enough.

jeremy

5

Thanks Jeremy,

I recently signed with a new hosting company and I’ll be using
Passenger. I plan to work with several apps and Passenger is new to me.

I’m still on my way to deploy my first app (move it from somewhere else
actually) and since I know I have to fight first with rails 2.3.3 I
wouldn’t want to spend much time with Passenger. So unless my
development setup without passenger would be a problem when deploying I
would like to do the passenger stuff later on.

But I’ll get into it for sure so your points are of great help.
Thanks a lot for the comments.

Cheers.

6

On Sun, Aug 30, 2009 at 4:50 PM, Jeremy K.[email protected]
wrote:

Passenger absolutely rocks for development, particularly when you work
on multiple apps.

Add some local domains like yourapp.test to /etc/hosts. Then anytime
you want to hit your app, just load it in the browser. No fiddling
with starting/stopping mongrels. Plus, stuff like concurrent Ajax
requests will actually work.

And it REALLY rocks on OS X with the Passenger preference pane, which

automatically sets up the right vhost configurations for Apache

for multiple apps
handles dns resolution via bonjour

This makes passenger for development on OS X the best setup IMHO.

Rick DeNatale

Blog: http://talklikeaduck.denhaven2.com/
Twitter: http://twitter.com/RickDeNatale
WWR: http://www.workingwithrails.com/person/9021-rick-denatale
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/rickdenatale

7

Rick Denatale wrote:
[…]

And it REALLY rocks on OS X with the Passenger preference pane, which

automatically sets up the right vhost configurations for Apache

for multiple apps

So what? I don’t want to run multiple Rails apps on my dev machine
simultaneously. (I do use vhosts for other purposes, but I generally
set them up with Webmin.)

handles dns resolution via bonjour

Again, would be great on a server, but useless on a dev box.

This makes passenger for development on OS X the best setup IMHO.

Maybe if I had a day job with a computer that I only used for Web
development, I’d agree. But as a freelancer with a multipurpose dev
laptop, Passenger just seems like a complete waste of disk space.
(Servers are a different matter, of course.)

I can’t think of a good reason to use Passenger on my dev machine, and
this thread hasn’t presented any so far.

–
Rick DeNatale

Blog: http://talklikeaduck.denhaven2.com/
Twitter: http://twitter.com/RickDeNatale
WWR: http://www.workingwithrails.com/person/9021-rick-denatale
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/rickdenatale

Best,

Marnen Laibow-Koser
http://www.marnen.org
[email protected]

8

Jeremy, can’t agree more with you!

  • your browser remembers all URLs separately for each app, and not all
    URLs for all your apps you’ve recently touched.

Greetings,
Wojciech

9

On Mon, Aug 31, 2009 at 1:22 PM, Marnen Laibow-Koser <
[email protected]> wrote:

set them up with Webmin.)
laptop, Passenger just seems like a complete waste of disk space.

WWR: http://www.workingwithrails.com/person/9021-rick-denatale
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/rickdenatale

Best,

Marnen Laibow-Koser
http://www.marnen.org
[email protected]

I guess one good reason to use Passenger would be to fully duplicate
your
production
environment locally. Mongrel and Thin are great but the less surprises
the
better going
from development to staging to production. Also, most of the machines
that
I use are
8-core with 16-32GB RAM or, in the case of the laptop, 8 GB RAM/2-core
3.06
GHz. Thus,
memory isn’t an issue but I can see where it would be an issue if one
does
not have the
resources to support Passenger in development mode. Finally, it really
comes down to
your personal preference and the requirements that one has to meet.

-Conrad

10

+1 Passenger for development I wrote a blog post about this a while
back.

http://www.robbyonrails.com/articles/2009/02/11/switch-to-passenger-mod_rails-in-development-on-osx-in-less-than-7-minutes-or-your-money-back

Good luck!

Robby

On Sun, Aug 30, 2009 at 10:58 AM, comopasta
Gr[email protected] wrote:

–
Posted via http://www.ruby-forum.com/.

–
Robby R.
Chief Evangelist, Partner

PLANET ARGON, LLC
design // development // hosting w/Ruby on Rails

http://robbyonrails.com/
http://twitter.com/planetargon
aim: planetargon

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