Just a few days ago Passenger was released in order to better integrate Rails with Apache. I decided to give it a try as I see it being very useful to simplify Rails deployments. I was also interested in testing the performance compared to nginx and mongrel.

I setup a virtual server for a client to host a Rails application on an Ubuntu 7.10 system. Here I have documented the steps to install all the necessary pieces of software. This is a MySQL5.0/Rails2.0/Mongrel1.1/Apache2.2 setup with Subversion for source code management. I realize that Apache is not the most popular frontend but for this client security and maturity are important. I also realize that their are alternatives to Mongrel, MySQL, and Subversion as well that are well worth considering. So rather than this being THE Rails stack I think of it as A Rails stack suited for a particular customer.