Comments on: Rails 2.3.0 + IIS7 + FastCGI = Rails on Windows FTW!

By: Will

Will — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 03:51:21 +0000

These instructions are over a year old. At this point, if you want to run Ruby on Rails under IIS, I would suggest going with Rails on IronRuby and IronRuby.rack to run it under IIS.

By: ahmed

ahmed — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 18:38:57 +0000

Thanks for your great article.
A porblem is that I can’t see the body of your config file in part 10 – web.config and the only thing is viewable is the firts line. Please also tell where this config file should be placed.
Thanks again

By: Will

Will — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 01:59:51 +0000

My bet is that you copy-pasted from my post, and its choking on the first line. For some reason, Word Press wants to HTML encode that line, but no others. Anyway, its the mandatory XML declaration. Try HTML decoding that first line to see if that fixes the problem.

By: Chris

Chris — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 18:03:45 +0000

Hello,

First I want to say great post. This is a situation I am working through right now, but am having an issue with the web config loading. I am getting an error saying that it is not properly formed xml. Have you ever run into this? Has anyone ever run into this?

Keep up the quality writing!

Thanks,
-Chris

By: On Bits » Blog Archive » Notícias do Front #3

On Bits » Blog Archive » Notícias do Front #3 — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 06:15:05 +0000

[...] o blogueiro William Green publicou mais um artigo sobre IIS, desta vez mostrando como rodar Rails 2.3, com IIS 7, com FastCGI. Eu já fiz cenários desse antes e descobri que rodar inicialmente não é difícil, mas manter o [...]

By: Dejan Dimic

Dejan Dimic — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 08:19:06 +0000

My customers are mostly Windows oriented and I share your pain, even I do my Rails development on Ubuntu.

Personally I use, if I had to, IIS proxy to Mongrel as it seams to me to be a better way. Both running as services.

The main problem that I have are the proprietary MS SQL data bases. That can be managed too but it’s a pain.

The final point is that Ruby and Ruby on Rails development on Windows platforms is even a pleasant adventure.

By: Will

Will — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 12:07:46 +0000

@AkitaOnRails Thanks! The article is mostly geared towards folks who, like me, don’t have a Linux box at their disposal, and due to the nature of their jobs, cannot use outside servers (I’m I. Healthcare, so I have HIPPA to worry about). I do recognize that FastCGI is most likely not the way forward for deploying Rails on Windows. However, as you can see, it is an easy win, especially to show your boss or coworkers Rails running behind a Microsoft stack.

IIS 7’s Application Request Routing, as it stands right now, is a non-starter with mongrel. This is because it doesn’t do proxying to the same host name, with different ports for each member of the farm. At least, there is no GUI for it. I know there is appcmd, but I don’t know enough about it yet to say if it can be done. However, appcmd may also be a way to automate deployment with Capistrano.

Another idea I’m kicking around is writing an IIS module or handler, using IronRuby, that speaks the Rack protocol. I’ll keep everyone posted.

By: AkitaOnRails

AkitaOnRails — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 04:49:03 +0000

Nice article. I also try to help Windows users to develop Rails. But my recommendation is: develop under Windows and deploy production stuff under Linux. IIS + Ruby’s FCGI is simply unusable. You can use IIS 7’s newest reverse proxy and url rewrite module to fall back to mongrel processes instead and avoid FCGI’s nightmare altogether. This is the only available option to Rails deployment under Windows.

Try running some httperf or apache bench runs. I tested FCGI under IIS6 and the ruby processes would easily die after around 100 requests, rendering it unusable for real usage. Leave Task Manager opened and pay attention to the ruby processes there. If you apply just a little bit of pressure on them, they will crash and restart.