Since zena is a multi-site application, it needs to have many “public” folders (one for each site):

  app
  ...
  sites
    +-- example.com
    |   +-- public
    +-- foo.com
        +-- public

This meant that Passenger (a.k.a. mod_rails) could not guess the correct location of our application’s root from the DocumentRoot defined in the virtual host file. To make zena or other multi-site applications run with passenger, we needed a way to explicitly declare the location of the application’s root, something like PassengerAppRoot.

I am glad to announce that our patch to add this feature has been accepted (PassengerAppRoot). You can use it like:

<VirtualHost example.com>
    DocumentRoot /var/rails/zena/sites/example.com/public
    PassengerAppRoot /var/rails/zena
</VirtualHost>

The advantage of passenger is that there is an automatic and powerful application pool management system built in. When any process starts to misbehave, it is automatically restarted. Passenger is also much more friendly for shared hosting deployment, and it’s fast !

Using mod_rails, we do not have to fiddle with mongrel configuration, balancer issues and url rewriting.