First, I know nothing about web servers, ports, networks and stuff..
I was comfortable with my webrick for development...
Now, I developed an app for internal use in my company, we have a
server and about 50 computers in the network. I can have a virtual
server for my app, with whatever OS I want.
Let's say I'll go for ubuntu, since I'm used to that.
What, in a nutshell, do I have to do?
Install mongrel, open a port(?!?) and make it visible in the
intranet...
install apache too??
use webrick? why not?
THe fact that it's a intranet app doesn't really change much - whatever you read about normal deployments is still ok.
If you run just mongrel or just webrick you will not be able to process concurrent requests (and it's a bit wasteful to be using them to serve static content like your images and stylesheets).
Most people are either using apache/nginx to load balance to some mongrels or increasingly, mod_rails (also known as passenger)
Deploying your app to an intranet isn't very different from deploying
it to the whole internet.
Your app doesn't seem like it's going to get an unreal amount of
traffic, so worrying about load balancers and clusters isn't going to
be worth your time. I'd take a simple route and install Ubuntu Server
on your VM, get MySQL (or whatever RDMBS) installed, setup Apache and
finally install Phusion's Passenger.
This tutorial should get you started pretty quickly:
let me ask one stupid thing... when I run webrick i get rails on
0.0.0.0:3000
if I do that on a server, can't I just connect to it inserting the
server IP and :3000?
I mean, can't I use webrick alone? Do I have to install apache/
mongrel?
This app isn't that big, and won't get many requests...
let me ask one stupid thing... when I run webrick i get rails on
0.0.0.0:3000
if I do that on a server, can't I just connect to it inserting the
server IP and :3000?
That will work (don't forget to switch it to production mode). if you
install mongrel (just gem install mongrel) then script/server will run
mongrel rather than webrick
