“The future of Rails deployment belongs to Mongrel,” they said.

So, about a month ago, not long after Lighty had settled into its little corner of the new server and was happily churning out web sites, I decided to shut it down. Lightttpd is a great web server, but my new CRAM setup feels so much better.

I’m talking about Capistrano, Rails, Apache, Mongrel. Coda Hale wrote a great article on setting it up. I used his basic procedure, tailored it to my specific needs/personality, and voila! CRAM!

See, Apache + FastCGI was sketchy at best, but Apache + Mongrel seems to be delightful. Now that Apache’s back in the mix, it’s a lot easier to run my PHP-based sites (and sites that rely on .htaccess files) alongside my Rails apps. And, even though Apache 2.2 wasn’t my favorite thing to install (nor was it my least favorite), I’m feeling darn good about my decision. Not only have I had much success with CRAM so far, there’s plenty of evidence that the Mongrel will be around for a bit. Edge Rails now uses Mongrel by default, and it’ll even be a part of Leopard’s Rails setup.

Speaking of Rails in Leopard. Nothing surprised me more that that news. I’m still a bit dumbfounded.

So, if you are developing in Rails and are trying to decide what sort of server stack/deployment you want to use, try CRAM.