A2 Hosting : Ruby On Rails Hosting : Linux Web Hosting with PHP 5, MySQL 5, cPanel 11 and more!

What is Ruby on Rails?

Rails is a full-stack framework for developing database-backed web applications according to the Model-View-Control pattern. From the Ajax in the view, to the request and response in the controller, to the domain model wrapping the database, Rails gives you a pure-Ruby development environment.

See Our Rails Getting Started Guide

See rubyonrails.com for more info

Common Paths:

/usr/bin/ruby
/usr/bin/rails

Versions:

Ruby 1.8.5
Rails 2.1 (Latest)

Usage:

Ruby on Rails requires an account with SSH access. You can install rails yourself by simply typing "rails /path/to/rails" where '/path/to/rails' is a directory of your choosing under your home directory.

E.g., if your username is USER, these are the steps to setting up rails under your account:

cd /home/USER
rails /home/USER/railsapp
cd public_html
ln -s ../railsapp/public rails

You could then access your rails app via the web at a URL such as http://www.yourdomain.com/rails/ (Keep the slash at the end!)

NOTE: Rails unfortunately will not work with temporary URLs such as http://wwwX.a2hosting.com/~username/rails/

Mongrel Vs. FastCGI:

Looking for a performance boost for your Rails application? Please see our cPanel Mongrel Setup Instructions. Mongrel is an excellent replacement for FastCGI when it comes to high-speed deployments of Ruby on Rails. See This Site for more information about Mongrel.

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. Mongrel is the latest technology in Rails acceleration and is what we are currently using on our latest servers.

What is SCGI?

The SCGI protocol is a replacement for the Common Gateway Interface (CGI) protocol. It is a standard for applications to interface with HTTP servers (like Apache). It is similar to FastCGI but is designed to be easier to implement. SCGI is older than Mongrel but we still support it on some of our older servers that for one reason or another cannot run Mongrel at this time. We do not support SCGI for accounts on our newer servers.

What About Typo?

Typo is a popular blogging software package that's powered by Ruby on Rails. Typo will work on our servers whether your Rails instance is running via CGI, SCGI, or Mongrel. See our tutorial on setting up a Typo Blog here. For more information about Typo, visit Typo's Site.

Ruby Gems:

If you need to use a GEM that you don't see installed, let us know and we'd be happy to install it for you.

Ruby on Rails Web Hosting

All of our hosting packages include support for Ruby on Rails. We offer affordable shared and dedicated Ruby hosting packages that include many of your favorite add-ons including cPanel, PHP, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Python, SSH access and more at unbelievable prices.

Why Host Your Ruby Scripts Here?

We keep up with the latest version of Ruby on Rails. All of our customer support is handled by the A2 Hosting Guru Crew, real system administrators and developers with many years of experience. We even offer a 30-day money-back guarantee to back this up. Go ahead and give us a try, you have nothing to lose!