Carrying over from weekend cleanup, I started exploring the different deployment options available. Here are some bleak notes as I go along:
Phusion Passenger. Tried this one with Apache 2 and mpm-prefork instead of mpm-worker since mpm-worker was chewing through my 256mb of ram too quickly. Using Passenger with normal Ruby was easy enough. It really simplied what needed to be defined in the vhost. Using Passenger with their recommended 'enterprise' Ruby was simply a nightmare. Trying to restart Apache with PassengerRuby set to enterprise ruby's path had load path issues. Even after hacking up the file that was whining with liberal amounts of load path unshifting, it still acted funny. Also, it clutters up your system with basically a whole new branch of ruby: gems, irb, ruby, you name it. The last bit of annoynance was that the deb they provide had a broken uninstaller, so I had to manually remove /opt when I was purging it.