Preferable way to distribute a Rails app

Although Rails and PHP have different deployment methods, what is the preferable way to distribute a FOSS Rails app? Suppose one of the major PHP apps - Magento, Drupal, Wordpress had been build upon RoR, what would have been the preferable way for them to have distributed开发者_高级运维 their application?

Packaging up the code as a gem seems to be the wrong approach for a complete out-of-the-box application, but I could be wrong.

Coming from the world of PHP with its upload-and-go approach, and being a newcomer to Rails, it's rather opaque at the moment to see how code could be easily and effectively distributed.

Packaging a completed Rails app as a gem is probably the wrong approach. I think the best solution is to provide access to a git repository or a tarball of your git repo.

If you want to offer your users something more than rake db:schema:load to setup your app it's pretty easy to create custom setup commands.

Many applications are packaged with the source code just like typical PHP applications. While deploying Rails applications may seem difficult its expected that the user will know how to set up the server properly according to their environment and needs. The only issue you need to worry about is distributing the code, setting up the server is not a domain that you are going to want to help with.

For information on deployment in Rails you should see the deployment page here.

Well, usually Rails apps run in environment running Apache + Passenger (aka mod_rails).

Deployment is easily done with Capistrano gem.

When you're running Rails app in shared host environment, they usually use fcgi/cgi dispatchers to run Ruby.