Deployment

Blog Posts

Phusion Passenger now supports Merb Check out the Phusion Passenger page for more info.
Nginx and Mongrel Merb – Yes, it’s outdated but that has a great nginx configuration file.
Soar with Merb
Starter guide for getting configured on Fedora 8 – Updated 4/13/08
Merb Server Management

Phusion Passenger.

See separate page for Phusion Passenger. In 2.0 it supports Rack-based frameworks so you can use it with Merb.

Choosing An Application Server

Due its being threaded, Mongrel is still the king as a general purpose application server.
Use of an evented server (Thin, Ebb, Evented Mongrel) is only a viable option for applications that have very fast response times for every action (i.e. an API that serves JSON) as a long running action will queue any subsequent requests until its completion.

Booting Your Production Application

merb -e production -c 4 --port 9000

will start four Mongrels on ports 9000, 9001, 9002 and 9003 in production mode.

This can be done programatically with Capistrano:

# config/deploy.rb

set :adapter, 'mongrel' # or 'thin'
set :start_port, 4000
set :processes, 4
set :log_path, "#{shared_path}/log/production.log" 

namespace :deploy do
 desc "Start Merb Instances" 
  task :start do
    run "merb -a #{adapter} -e production -c #{processes} --port #{start_port} -m #{current_path} -L #{log_path}" 
  end

  desc "Stop Merb Instances" 
  task :stop do
    run "cd #{current_path} && merb -a #{adapter} -k all" 
  end

  desc 'Custom restart task for Merb'
  task :restart, :roles => :app do
    deploy.stop
    deploy.start
  end
end

Using Nginx

Install Nginx

In Debian

$ sudo apt-get install nginx

In Archlinux

Make sure you have the community repo configured in your /etc/pacman.conf

pacman -S nginx

Once Nginx has been installed, the configuration for the merb application needs to be applied.

Configuring Nginx

This has been split up into the general configuration and the specific virtual host for the application. First, the general configuration as shown below:

# /etc/nginx/nginx.conf
user  www-data www-data; #chowned this user/group
worker_processes  4;

error_log  /var/log/nginx/error.log;
pid        /var/run/nginx.pid;

events {
    worker_connections  1024;
}

http {
    include       /etc/nginx/mime.types;
    default_type  application/octet-stream;

    access_log    /var/log/nginx/access.log;

    sendfile        on;
    #tcp_nopush     on;

    #keepalive_timeout  0;
    keepalive_timeout  65;
    tcp_nodelay        on;

    gzip  on;

    upstream proxy_server {
     server 127.0.0.1:4000;
     server 127.0.0.1:4001;
     server 127.0.0.1:4002;
     server 127.0.0.1:4003;
    }

    # virtual configs
    include /etc/nginx/conf/vhosts/app.conf;
}

and then the specific virtual configuration file:

 # /etc/nginx/conf/vhosts/app.conf
server {
 listen 80;

 client_max_body_size 50M;

 server_name www.myservername.com;

 root /path/to/app/current/public;

 if (-f $document_root/system/maintenance.html) {
  rewrite ^(.*)$ /system/maintenance.html last;
  break;
 }

 location / {
  proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
  proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
  proxy_set_header Host $http_host;
  proxy_redirect false;
  proxy_max_temp_file_size 0;
  if (-f $request_filename) {
   break;
  }
  if (-f $request_filename/index.html) {
   rewrite (.*) $1/index.html break;
  }

  if (-f $request_filename.html) {
   rewrite (.*) $1.html break;
  }

  if (!-f $request_filename) {
   proxy_pass http://proxy_server;
   break;
  }  }

 error_page 500 502 503 504 /500.html;
 location = /500.html {
  root /path/to/app/current/public;
 }
}

Configuring for a shared host

If you want to run your merb app on a /prefix on your server, edit init.rb and add c[:path_prefix] = '/prefix' within the Merb::Config.use do |c| block.

Merb Wiki