Mongrel users - Feb 2006 - Mongrel 0.3.6 -- Win32 Service/Rails Real Good

Hello Folks,

This release of Mongrel should make the win32 folks go crazy.  Thanks to
Luis Lavena it supports a full service system for installing any Rails app
as a service.  This lets you start your rails apps from either the command
line or the Service console.  Stopping is still a bit problematic but we
hope to have that solved in the next release.

You win32 folks should probably send Luis cookies or something since his
work just plain rocks.  It''s rare in a Ruby project that the win32
support
starts to get better than the POSIX systems.


== What is Mongrel?

Mongrel is a fast HTTP library and server for Ruby that is intended for
hosting Ruby web applications of any kind using plain HTTP rather than
FastCGI or SCGI. It is framework agnostic and already supports Ruby On
Rails, Og+Nitro, and Camping frameworks.


== Changes for 0.3.6

* A really complete win32 service runner for installing any Rails app as a
Mongrel service.
* Lots of fixes to the Rails support and CGIWrapper.  Other frameworks
should be able to poach all the starter/runner scripts (even the service
one) and replicate this setup.
* Support for specifying a YAML file of additional MIME types you need.
Mongrel has a few but you can specify more.  This is available for both the
win32 service and regular mongrel_rails runner.
* It''s been used heavily by myself and others while in development mode
so
it should be usable for many people.
* content-type and redirects from behind a proxy are working again.
* A bunch of documentation on how to run Mongrel in various situations with
more to come.
* Win32 gem no longer depends on daemons.  Other systems do depend on it.

-- Only thing with the win32 service is that stopping is a bit broken.
Nothing big though since everyone loves Mongrel so much they probably will
never stop it.


== Installing The Goods

For non-win32 people just do:

  $ gem install mongrel

Or gem upgrade if you''ve already got Mongrel.

For win32 folks I had to build a special win32-service gem based on Dan
Berger''s fantastic work.  You''ll need to do this:

  $ gem install win32-service
  $ gem install mongrel

If you alredy have win32-service installed then skip the first command.  The
gem for win32-service is based on the 0.5.0 version.


== Using The Win32 Service


There''s a more extensive doc here:

http://mongrel.rubyforge.org/docs/win32.html

But for the impatient, do this:

 $ mongrel_rails_service install -n myapp \
    -r c:\my\path\to\myapp -p 4000 -e production
 $ mongrel_rails_service start -n myapp

And you''re hooked up.  You can also still use the previous method of
just
running it from the command line with mongrel_rails start but use
CTRL-Pause/Break to stop (not CTRL-C).


== Mailing Lists

We''ve been doing pre-release announcements and discussing development
on the
mailing list.  Feel free to join
http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/mongrel-users


== Next Release

We should have the stopping problem cleaned up and maybe a few more win32
goodies as well.  There should also be the start of a filtering setup which
will lead to some caching, gzip/deflate content, and security controls.

Feel free to request any other features and report bugs.


Zed A. Shaw
http://www.zedshaw.com/