Deployment Strategies for Rails on Windows servers

Last updated on April 3rd, 2008 by Brian Hogan

Some of the information on this page and the corresponding articles is now out of date. Please note that much of this information will be covered in Deploying Rails Applications, published by Pragmatic Bookshelf. That means I can't update these articles right now. If you have specific questions regarding deployment on Windows, feel free to contact me directly.

Deploying Ruby on Rails applications on Windows servers is a difficult issue. Many in the Rails community develop and deploy on Linux or MacOS-based servers, meaning that there are less resources available to get things working on Windows. To make it worse, Microsoft's web server isn't very capable yet when it comes to deploying applications.

I've been working on various setups for the last few months and as a result, I am providing the following articles to the community free of charge. If you'd like to make a small contribution to cover bandwidth costs, it would be much appreciated.

 

Each one of these articles makes use of my reverse_proxy_fix plugin and includes detailed instructions for configuring this plugin.

As always, if you have questions or feedback, send it to ror_dev (at) napcs.com and I will be happy to help out. I am also available for consultation on these issues.

 

Integrate Rails into an Existing IIS Web infrastructure using Mongrel

This article covers using IIS and ISAPIRewrite to forward requests to Mongrel as a Windows service running on higher ports This is the preferred approach at this time, as it is the least resource intensive.

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Serving Multiple Rails Applications on Windows with Apache and Mongrel

This article covers the deployment of a single instance of Apache running on a Windows server that proxies requests to various instances of Mongrel running as Windows services on higher ports.

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Integrate Rails into an Existing IIS Web infrastructure using Apache and FastCGI

This article covers the installation of Apache and FastCGI on a Windows-based server and then proxying requests rfrom IIS to Apache on a higher port. This is an excellent solution if you need to host a couple of large Rails application on a Windows server.

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Integrate Rails into an Existing IIS Web Infrastructure using Lighttpd and Mongrel

In this article, I cover how to install Lighttpd on Windows as a service and then forward requests through IIS to multiple instances of Mongrel using the load balancer in Lighttpd.

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