One Rails thing that has always felt just a bit un-rails like is deployment. There are a ton of solutions out there. I’ve used Lighttpd, fast-cgi, and mongrel proxied by Apache. Almost all of these have been tedious, a pain, and failure prone.
The Dutch have come to our rescue with Passenger (aka mod_rails). Passenger allows you to run your Rails apps natively within Apache. No need for proxies, mongrel clusters or anything else. They even claim that it recovers from server errors.
The best part is that it’s brain-dead simple. If you can execute a few lines on a command line and add a virtual host to Apache, you can host your Rails app in Passenger.
