I’m considering using Ruby on Rails for a big, important project. Today I was reading about the deployment options for Rails, and none of them sound all that promising. You can deploy on WEBrick, which is just a Ruby script. That works fine for development or for small internal sites, but isn’t appropriate for larger sites. The second option is to deploy on Apache 1.3 with FastCGI. The third option is to deploy on lighttpd, which at the time Agile Web Development with Rails was written, has “a number of major stability problems.” Obviously there are some big, popular applications written in Rails, but I don’t want to put the system administrator in a position where his pager is going off all night because of the deployment options forced upon us by choosing Rails as our development environment.
Obviously, if Rails continues to grow in popularity, this won’t be an issue. Someone will provide a way to run Rails applications on Apache 2 and lighttpd’s stability problems will be eliminated. In the meantime, though, is it worth making a full commitment to Rails? Chapter 22 of the Rails book has left me a bit shaken.