soaked and soaped

Already two weeks ago, version 0.3.18 of Mongrel was released.
Read about the important integration of fastthread and how to install it.

As I mentioned in my last post, RadRails 0.7.1 now supports Mongrel. So I decided to use Mongrel instead of Webrick for development on my notebook. But it was a bit tricky and took me a bit of googling to get it.

As Joe wrote in his post about installing Mongrel on MacOS X, I’ll describe how to install it on Ubuntu, assuming you already have Ruby and Ruby on Rails up and running.

Because Mongrel is partly written in C/C++ for more performance, you have to install the build-essential package. It will install all needed packages so that you can compile C/C++ applications.

sudo apt-get install build-essential
(You can also use the synaptic package manager to install it, if you prefer a GUI)

You also need the @ ruby1.8-dev@ package. When you try to install Mongrel without this installed, it will complain with this errormessage:
extconf.rb:1:in `require’: no such file to load — mkmf (LoadError)
from extconf.rb:1

Install the package with this command:
sudo apt-get install ruby1.8-dev

Then just use gem to install Mongrel:
sudo gem install mongrel —include-dependencies

Gem will ask you, which version of Mongrel you want to install. Choose the latest ruby verion.
Then you’ll see some output from the C/C++ compiler.


Ok, you’re done! Now you can start the server with mongrel_rails in your Railsapp directory.

NOTE: Even without the build-essential package installed, Mongrel will install and say that installation was successful. But when you try to start the server, you’ll get an error message like this:
** Starting Mongrel listening at 0.0.0.0:3000
/usr/local/ruby-1.8.4/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/mongrel-0.3.13.3/lib/
mongrel.rb:666:in `register’: undefined method `resolve’ for
nil:Mongrel::URIClassifier (NoMethodError)

A few days ago I began working on a design for the “soaked and soaped”-blog. Webrick seemed a bit slow for working offline on an app like Typo so I decided to give mongrel a try.

After installing it via RubyGems…
$ sudo gem install mongrel

.. I quickly realized that something went wrong during installation.
I tried to start mongrel in my RailsApp directory but all that happened was getting an error message that HttpHandler doesn’t exist.

I googled a bit and finally found this.

It says that the mongrel installation routine needs a programm called ginstall to work proper. Bad luck, Mac OS X has no program called ginstall, but one which is called install and which resides on another location than ginstall.

So all you have to do, do get mongrel running on OS X is:

1. Uninstall it (if you have already installed it).
$ sudo gem uninstall mongrel

2. Set a symbolic link from the “install”-command to the place, the install script wants to have a program called “ginstall”.
$ sudo ln -s /usr/bin/install /opt/local/bin/ginstall

3. Install mongrel again via RubyGems
$ sudo gem install mongrel

4. After installation is complete, switch into your railsapp directory and start mongrel.
$ cd your/railsapp
$ mongrel_rails start