I recently spent three days trying to get cherokee-1.0.19 (the version in FreeBSD ports as of this writing) to serve up a variety of custom web apps (mostly rails-2.3.8) partitioned and RVM. I had pretty much zero success Googling for help during this exercise so I thought I might compile my experience here for future Googlers.

Before this I had them deployed using apache22 and Phusion Passenger (without RVM). This set up wasn’t working well for me. I’m not saying it’s the wrong way to go (I’m also not going to say a zillion rails users can’t be wrong) but it wasn’t performing well for me and it wasn’t really my style. I’ve been using apache forever, and piling more and more crap on top of it was just getting frustrating. It really just wasn’t built for this.

So I start to hear about all these young httpds like lighttpd, nginx, and cherokee. I poked around a bit, and I decided cherokee’s graphical configuration interface sounded nice for a change. At this point I should inform you that I did not at all download or look much into lighttpd or nginx. They could be just as good for this, but that’s another blog entry on another blog.

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