I’ve been getting into hacking together quick web ideas via Sinatra, which is a great little Ruby web framework for getting things going QUICKLY.  I love how easy it is to get started (not many lines) and it supports HAML pretty much automatically.  It also lets you run a quick webserver just by running “ruby <yourfile.rb>”.

This is a great mechanism for development, because it allows really speedy iterations (or bugfixing).  However, some of these ideas are things I want to share or run more than just in a development mode, although not quite turn them into a full bore application.

Enter Phusion Passenger, the “mod_rails” plugin for Apache.  Passenger works for all Rack based applications, including Sinatra, making it pretty easy to setup a Sinatra app at a slightly more permanent location.

On l3ib.org, we have run lighttpd since the server was born, purely chosen out of its ease of syntax.  Over the years, things have been grafted on and some things are straight up hard to do on lighttpd, such as deploy Rails applications.  Luckily, our server provides a second public IP address, which Apache runs on.

Tonight, I created a staging area, called stage.minuslab.net, where I can dump these testing Sinatra apps as suburls.  I won’t link to the one app I put in there just yet as it is resource intensive and I don’t know yet how to throttle it to the outside world, but that will be coming a later haxpact entry.

I also wrote a quick script to manage adding each application as it is ready to be “deployed” – it adds the sub-uri to the stage.minuslab.net Apache configuration file, sets up the proper symlinks, writes the config.ru that is required, and restarts Apache all in one shot.  The script is buggy and internal only so I won’t share that either tonight, but it’s making developing small ideas with Sinatra even easier.