Internet references are years out of date and links to downloads broken. Is Rails on IIS dead?
We need to make a development decision and right now the situation it looks dire for Ruby on Rails... We could do with a straight answer.
Internet references are years out of date and links to downloads broken. Is Rails on IIS dead?
Was it ever alive?! :-/
We need to make a development decision and right now the situation it looks dire for Ruby on Rails... We could do with a straight answer.
hmmm... maybe the situation looks dire for IIS? Are you somehow constrained to IIS for your web application?
What is IIS?
Do any of those references refer to Rack? I think that's the issue any more. I'm pretty sure that if you can host a Rack application on IIS, then you can host Rails.
I've never tried, because I've never needed to. I last used IIS in the late 90s, and I'm pretty sure it's changed a lot since then, but at the time, it was in principle trying very hard to ape the Apache conventions so as to ease uptake. Things like .htaccess and CGI and address rewriting were designed to be fairly transferable from one environment to the other.
What is your use-case that is binding you to IIS?
Walter
Internet references are years out of date and links to downloads broken.
Is Rails on IIS dead?
Was it ever alive?! :-/
We need to make a development decision and right now the situation it
looks dire for Ruby on Rails… We could do with a straight answer.
hmmm… maybe the situation looks dire for IIS? Are you somehow
constrained to IIS for your web application?
I tried on IIS about 1.5 years ago… hey, not sure but I hear the folks at Bloomberg.com develop rails on windows, not sure if they deploy to windows but maybe that is a lead. But really my experience was a nightmare trying to deploy on windows.
Kevin Bedell wrote in post #1036546:
What is IIS?
Your are kidding, right?
Why should he be? This is a Rails list; if you asked on a .Net list whether C# apps could be deployed with Passenger, some people there might ask what ‘Passenger’ is :-/
/s/Passenger/Nginx
...would probably be a better equivalent 
"Windows" is not necessarily "IIS" - it's perfectly possible to deploy on Windows (with Apache, Passenger, etc). Deploying with IIS as per the OP... that's likely to be much harder.
I appreciate the answers, but, why is everyone asking about my business case for IIS?
Suffice it to say that I am bound by corporate policy which is now committed to Microsoft technology. I don't want to get into an argument over merits of Apache versus IIS but corporate policy perceives Apache as a quirky open source thing that poses a security risk. Having to manually keep it up to date and the relatively large volume of security bulletins appear to have contributed to this perception.
Walter, its not about Rack. There is a 10 steps document which doesn't work and there are links to FastCGI and RubyForIIS which no longer appear to be available. I guess I'm asking whethere there exists an up-to-date and working Rails ISAPI module for IIS.
I appreciate the answers, but, why is everyone asking about my business case for IIS?
Because you're telling us about a problem you have, and we're asking you to back-up a little...
Suffice it to say that I am bound by corporate policy which is now committed to Microsoft technology.
Well, then you won't be using Rails, as it's not MS technology, and you would be breaching your corporate policy if you did. Alternatively, if you can meet your "policy" by using Windows servers, but other software (like Apache, or even a *nix VM running on a Windows-based hypervisor...) then Rails may be an option.
over merits of Apache versus IIS but corporate policy perceives Apache as a quirky open source thing that poses a security risk.
As opposed to quirky closed source things that pose security risks?!
Sounds like you have a management-education problem
Michael Pavling wrote in post #1036557:
"Windows" is not necessarily "IIS" - it's perfectly possible to deploy on Windows (with Apache, Passenger, etc). Deploying with IIS as per the OP... that's likely to be much harder.
I am aware that you can install Apache on Windows and that may be an option if I can persuade (using appropriate supportable arguments) someone to approve it. Looking at some of the comments I Have come across on other forums, they seem to concur with your last statement that setting up on IIS is (or at least was at the time) rather complex. However, I am bound by corporate policy to at least explore the possibility of using the native web server using other options only as a last resort (i.e. where this can be proven not to be possible or practical).
Hi,
You can have a look at
I used to work with .Net, now I'm developing with RoR (for a
year) from windows platform, and my recommendation will be to stay with ubuntu + apache server for production, as much as I will recommend to stay with windows + IIS for .Net applications and not to use for production (same case the opposite). It’s like having two cars one with gasoline and the other with diesel, they can both work well (not to say that one is better than the other one) and you can eventually consider only buying gasoline because it’s the standard and certificated fuel of the company and it might work for a while, but is a bad long term decision. Greetings,
Michael Pavling wrote in post #1036557:
"Windows" is not necessarily "IIS" - it's perfectly possible to deploy on Windows (with Apache, Passenger, etc). Deploying with IIS as per the OP... that's likely to be much harder.
I am aware that you can install Apache on Windows and that may be an option if I can persuade (using appropriate supportable arguments) someone to approve it. Looking at some of the comments I Have come across on other forums, they seem to concur with your last statement that setting up on IIS is (or at least was at the time) rather complex. However, I am bound by corporate policy to at least explore the possibility of using the native web server using other options only as a last resort (i.e. where this can be proven not to be possible or practical).
Well, that's understandable, and you have my sympathy (I left your
type of role for freelancing a few years ago, and was very glad to
leave the worst of the corporate politics behind
So; trying to be impartial [1], you have two choices. Stick to the corporate policy. and develop in .Net MVC (I'm afraid I can't even pass comment, because I've not been near it), or explain about the increased RoI, opportunity costs, workforce happiness, and other benefits of working with Rails.
Flipping the questions around: what's making you think that you would like to commence your development with RoR? Do you have existing skills in house?
PS I know of all sorts of large corporates that run Rails projects: Virgin Media, the BBC, BaeSystems, among others... if it's good enough for them, then maybe your bosses will reconsider whether it'll do for you
[1] but not succeeding, I'm afraid 
Michael Pavling wrote in post #1036562:
Suffice it to say that I am bound by corporate policy which is now committed to Microsoft technology.
Well, then you won't be using Rails, as it's not MS technology, and you would be breaching your corporate policy if you did.
Well, let's just say that Ruby/Rails appears to be the natural way to move on from Perl, but that's another argument....
As opposed to quirky closed source things that pose security risks?!
But at least we have Windows Update Services which ticks the relevant box niceley....
Sounds like you have a management-education problem
Its an all eggs in one basket contract leading to a management-brainwash
problem
These guys were asking for feedback / testing on their rails on IIS deployment solution a few months ago : http://groups.google.com/group/rubyonrails-talk/browse_thread/thread/d5bce3a24648c991/f97652ab21d5ce28?lnk=gst&q=iis#f97652ab21d5ce28
Fred
Please look into Helicon Zoo:
http://www.helicontech.com/zoo/
It contains a Rack-based IIS adapter. I believe requires Ruby 1.9.2 minimum and work with IIS and IIS Express
The previous versions of Ruby/Rails for IIS will not work mainly because:
* Where compiled with an incompatible version of Visual Studio that do not link to the same version of the CRT and thus, segfaults. * Is no longer maintained * FastCGI (which was used for those IIS plugins) do not compile under MinGW/GCC, which is the one used by latest Ruby installers.
Hope that helps.
Dont know about IIS but running rails on Windows is dog slow. I develop on a Windows box and deploy on Linux and the speed difference is marked. Have heard the same from others.
Pieter Hugo
Is that difference as noticeable if you run your Windows development machine in "production" mode?...