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Posts Tagged ‘phusion passenger’

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We’ve been busy testing, testing and re-testing, and are very happy to launch support for Rails 3 on our shared hosting platform. As part of the work to offer Rails 3, we have added support for bundler, a useful tool for managing your application dependencies (you are now free to install your own gems). Bundler can also be used on existing Rails 2.3.x and Sinatra hosting accounts.

Take a look at our new and updated knowledgebase articles (below) for all the details, or contact our support team if you have any additional questions.

• New: How do I set up a Rails 3 account with bundler?
• Updated: Can I install gems onto my Rails hosting account?
• Updated: How do I set up a database for my Rails application?
• Updated: Example Capistrano deployment script for customers using bundler

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We’ve been busy upgrading and improving again! Passenger 2.1.2, Ruby On Rails 2.3 and Ruby Enterprise Edition 1.8.6 (REE) have all been installed on our shared Rails hosting servers.

The installation of REE should solve any problems for those of you who required Ruby 1.8.6 (as opposed to the 1.8.5 version that comes with CentOS 5) for certain gems to work. The upgraded Passenger should also fix some of the mod_rewrite issues that you may have experienced, but our main reason for upgrading Passenger was to allow us to support the new Rails 2.3 release which has just been officially released today.

While REE has been setup so that Passenger runs your Rails apps with it, if you want to use it from within your SSH environment, there are a couple of little tweaks that you need to do. Just open a ticket and we’ll tell you how to achieve this.

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I’ve just been trying out running a Sinatra application on our Passenger servers and can confirm that Sinatra apps can now be hosted by 1st Easy!

If you aren’t sure what what Sinatra is, check out the intro at sintatrarb.com. If you want to create a small Ruby-based web application for which the full Rails stack would be overkill, then try it out.

Sinatra hosting is available right now on any Rails hosting account (as an alternative to Rails at this point – more research is required to see if we can run this alongside a Rails app). The (incredibly simple) deployment instructions will be added to our Knowledge Base shortly.

If you have a Rails-enabled dedicated server and would like to be able to run Sinatra apps on there too, just submit a ticket and we’ll sort it out for you.

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A significant development at 1st Easy that you might have missed from earlier in the year.

We are now able to count ourselves as one of the relatively few UK based hosting companies (as far as we’re aware) to offer support for both shared and dedicated Rails hosting accounts. Until recently, options for Rails developers with a requirement for UK based “physical” hosting (as opposed to a “slice”) have been somewhat limited, but the release of the Phusion Passenger (mod_rails) Apache module ¹ has made it feasible to offer a Rails application deployment platform on a shared account basis.

(more…)

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