Yesterday marked the first day of the RailsConf 2008. The Ruby landscape is changing in ways that don’t always include Rails. Merb, Datamapper and alternative database systems are changing the ways that Ruby developers are creating for the web.

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Anyone that reads blogs from the Rails community has probably already heard about God. No, not the deity in the sky, but an excellent monitoring application that watches your processes and keeps them running. I’ve mostly seen it used for taming mongrel but it can be used to monitor any process.

We’re running God for all our managed hosting clients to make sure their mongrels don’t pass out from exhaustion. Here’s our init script and a sample global config for your enjoyment.

• /etc/init.d/god
• /etc/god.conf

The God configuration file should be self explanatory. It’s just Ruby code, nothing magic going on there. I’ve just wrapped the core God.watch code around some loops to enable support for monitoring an unlimited number of applications. One small note about the init.d script: it first launches God, and then loads the config file via the ‘god load’ command. I’m aware that you can send god the -c parameter when launching it, but I’ve found that sometimes (seemingly randomly) that won’t load the config.

The init.d script should work fine on any RHEL /CentOS system. Once you add the file to /etc/init.d/god just do:

chmod +x /etc/init.d/god
chkconfig --add god
chkconfig --level 345 god on
/etc/init.d/god start

Now you’re good to go. Let those misbehaving K-9 devils do their best – they’re no match for God.

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I’m excited to announce that we have decided to offer a managed Rails hosting service to the public. Actually, the truth is we’ve been offering this service for a while. We just finally got around to publishing it.

We’ve specialized in Ruby on Rails web development for some time now, and have always deployed as well as run our own applications. Anyone who’s ever tackled Rails deployment and hosting will tell you it’s a tricky thing. We’ve tried a lot of different methods over the past year or so, and have built up what we feel is a pretty solid infrastructure for hosting Rails applications. After looking back at all the struggles we went through with Rails hosting, we figured we could offer our expertise up to other people and save them the headache.

The reason why I like this service offering so much is because it works great for small to medium-sized applications. There are some really good options out there for running very large, heavy-traffic Rails applications. However, for the most part they’re just overkill for the other guys. Good examples of “the other guys” are your company website, professional blog, or bootstrapped web application that’s just getting started.

For details on what our service includes as well as plan pricing, visit our managed Rails hosting page.

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