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by lukeholder 4791 days ago
If the phusion passenger people built a plugin for cpanel that gave easy installation and configuration of ruby/pythons app, I really think it could disrupt the php monopoly on cheap hosting for mid level web devs.

Deployment would be vastly eased to the same php strategy of "just ftp the files to the server and visit the website".
1 comments
Nux 4791 days ago
As an admin who unfortunately has to deal with "cheap hosting" quite often I'd say "Please, NO!" to that.

I don't think RoR and "cheap hosting" are compatible. RoR adds a maintenance overhead that kills the "cheap" part.

I did admin work for RoR "cheap hosting" and it sucks; lots of gems and multiple versions of them to install etc; this took a lot of my time and made security audits very hard, plus it's not always trivial to install them as some require NEW everything.

Whereas with PHP, 99,9% of the applications run just fine with a relatively simple PHP installation: e.g. core + xml, mysql, imap, gd, mbstring, mcrypt. Update it every once in a while and you're all set!

What RoR programmers need is a cheap vps/container with RVM (or similar) or very specialised platforms (e.g. Heroku).

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bluedino 4791 days ago
We have 15-20 apps that all run different versions of gems (including Rails 1-3) and it can be a nightmare. Nobody ever decided to use RVM or anything like that. A while ago you could update a gem and break 3 apps.

I can't imagine wheat it'd be like on a shared host with 100 apps all made by different people.

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jrochkind1 4791 days ago
> A while ago you could update a gem and break 3 apps.

You aren't using bundler, are you? You really really should be. It eliminates the vast majority of that class of problem. It's been best practice in Rails, and ruby deployment in general, to use bundler for several years now, it really does make that kind of problem go away.

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bluedino 4791 days ago
We are in our Rails 3 apps.
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jrochkind1 4789 days ago
It is possible to use Bundler even in Rails2 -- if you are getting a lot of pain from that class of problem, it might be worth it.

Although, really, Rails 2.3x stops getting even security updates very soon, it might make more sense to focus all your energy on getting off Rails 2 -- although I know very well how incredibly painful that is. You're in for pain no matter what, sadly.

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