I will deploy my sites with Passenger. I develop on windows with Instantrails so I should now use vmware if I want to have passenger also used during development. But is it really needed? Does it make much difference if I use Passenger or not for the development environment?
I don't use Passenger in development. I'm running osx, but that doesn't matter. I can't think of a reason to run passenger in development...
Passenger absolutely rocks for development, particularly when you work on multiple apps.
Add some local domains like yourapp.test to /etc/hosts. Then anytime you want to hit your app, just load it in the browser. No fiddling with starting/stopping mongrels. Plus, stuff like concurrent Ajax requests will actually work.
To go one step further with this convenience, set up dnsmasq and map *.test (or whatever top-level domain you want for local development) to 127.0.0.1. Then you can do stuff like subdomain-based accounts without adding every one to your /etc/hosts.
This setup is awesome for designers, too. Everyone on your team has the full app running locally with no fuss, so they can work on view code and CSS and see the results live. The way it should be.
I can't recommend this enough.
jeremy
Thanks Jeremy,
I recently signed with a new hosting company and I'll be using Passenger. I plan to work with several apps and Passenger is new to me.
I'm still on my way to deploy my first app (move it from somewhere else actually) and since I know I have to fight first with rails 2.3.3 I wouldn't want to spend much time with Passenger. So unless my development setup without passenger would be a problem when deploying I would like to do the passenger stuff later on.
But I'll get into it for sure so your points are of great help. Thanks a lot for the comments.
Cheers.
And it REALLY rocks on OS X with the Passenger preference pane, which
automatically sets up the right vhost configurations for Apache for multiple apps handles dns resolution via bonjour
This makes passenger for development on OS X the best setup IMHO.
Jeremy, can't agree more with you!
+ your browser remembers all URLs separately for each app, and not all URLs for all your apps you've recently touched.
Greetings, Wojciech
Rick Denatale wrote:
[…]
And it REALLY rocks on OS X with the Passenger preference pane, which
automatically sets up the right vhost configurations for Apachefor multiple apps
So what? I don’t want to run multiple Rails apps on my dev machine
simultaneously. (I do use vhosts for other purposes, but I generally
set them up with Webmin.)
handles dns resolution via bonjour
Again, would be great on a server, but useless on a dev box.
This makes passenger for development on OS X the best setup IMHO.
Maybe if I had a day job with a computer that I only used for Web
development, I’d agree. But as a freelancer with a multipurpose dev
laptop, Passenger just seems like a complete waste of disk space.
(Servers are a different matter, of course.)
I can’t think of a good reason to use Passenger on my dev machine, and
this thread hasn’t presented any so far.
– Rick DeNatale
Twitter: http://twitter.com/RickDeNatale
WWR: http://www.workingwithrails.com/person/9021-rick-denatale
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/rickdenatale
Best,
–
Marnen Laibow-Koser
I guess one good reason to use Passenger would be to fully duplicate your production
environment locally. Mongrel and Thin are great but the less surprises the better going
from development to staging to production. Also, most of the machines that I use are
8-core with 16-32GB RAM or, in the case of the laptop, 8 GB RAM/2-core 3.06 GHz. Thus,
memory isn’t an issue but I can see where it would be an issue if one does not have the
resources to support Passenger in development mode. Finally, it really comes down to
your personal preference and the requirements that one has to meet.
-Conrad