Which rails server for development?

Is there a "best" rails se开发者_高级运维rver to use for development (mongral, webrick, etc..)? Or does it not really matter?

Short answer: develop on what you will deploy on.

Long answer: good Rails containers, like Unicorn, Thin, etc, really don't impact your development much but will impact production. And, each has just enough configuration related quirks that interact with your code and choice of gems that just diving in and working in that environment can save a lot of time, even if using continuous integration, but especially if not.

The "best" in my opinion is Passenger in conjunction with your choice of Apache or nginx, whichever you're familiar with. It's perhaps the only game in town when it comes to getting an application running quickly and reliably. The Phusion team has invested a lot of time and effort into building a complete package for a scalable deployment platform.

Mongrel is only designed to be part of your stack and requires a number of supporting pieces to work properly. It also has to be managed with a separate process launcher and that can be frustrating and can cause serious issues if done wrong. Mongrel2 is a better platform but will need some time to be properly assimilated by the Rails community.

Webrick was never intended as a production web server. It is only a toy server for testing. It is painfully slow and can only service one request at a time.

See my answer here Recommendations (and Differences) between different Ruby on Rails Production Web Servers