You have no idea how good it makes me feel to officially announce that all of our Rails websites are running on Passenger (aka. mod_rails)!  I decided last week to completely make the change (and also to separate our PHP and static websites onto a separate server), so this long weekend was perfect.

In addition to making the switch from Mongrel, I also decided to move all of our production databases to MySQL.  When the Rails team decided to go with SQLite3 as the default database, I decided to give it a try.  I knew it was a bad idea in my gut, but I tried it anyway.  The biggest problem is that SQLite3 is simply not a database application -- it is a database library, so it can't support concurrency.  The second biggest problem, is that I couldn't centralize all my databases and get to all of them quickly and easily like I can with MySQL via CocoaMySQL.

The transfer to mod_rails/MySQL wasn't the hard part.  The hard part was the transfer from Mongrel/SQLite3.  I'll be writing up my experiences in my next few blog posts.  Here's some highlights:

• How to convert SQLite3 databases to MySQL databases
• Deployment with mod_rails
• SSL key passwords
• Writing ruby server scripts to make your life easier.

All in all, the conversion from Mongrel to mod_rails was the simplest and easiet architectural transition I've ever operated.

Posted by: Travis