What is the state of Python web app deployment today? Is it on par with Ruby? I honestly don’t know because although I’ve written plenty of Python code (mostly desktop apps and server scripts), I’ve never written a Python web app before beyond hello world, nor deployed one. Which is why this comment on Hacker News caught my attention:

Much needed. We pythonistas are still waiting for a deployment option as slick as ruby passenger.

So there is at least one person in the world who thinks that Phusion Passenger is slick and apparently better than anything that’s current available in Python land. Why, I’m flattered. However, I don’t know whether this is just the opinion of one man or whether there’s a general consensus in the Python community that deployment can and should be better.

What is better? As one of the authors of Phusion Passenger I define “better” as “easier”, “smoother”, “less painful”, which should also reveal the philosophy behind many of Phusion Passenger’s design choices. Not everybody agrees with Phusion Passenger’s design choices though. Graham Dumpleton, author of mod_wsgi, thinks… well let’s keep it at saying that he doesn’t think Phusion Passenger is a work of art. Needless to say I do not agree with his opinion nor his reasoning behind it. But Graham probably had other design choices and design philosophies than Phusion Passenger so he’s entitled to his opinions.

If there are any Pythonistas out there, please share your thoughts! Do you think there would be any demand for a hypothetical “Phusion Passenger for Python”? If not, what do you think about the current Python web app deployment situation? Do you think there’s room for improvement?

However, many people have reported that the Pledgie Paypal page is in Dutch. We’ve contacted Pledgie, and it turns out to be a bug in Paypal. The nice guys at Pledgie have implemented a workaround for this problem, so everything should be in English again. Our apologies for the inconvenience!

Thank you for your support!

NOTE: Some people might see the Paypal page in Dutch. We do not yet know why this happens. But if you’re wondering what to choose in the country drop-down box: “United States” is “Verenigde Staten” in Dutch. This has now been fixed.

We have recently been mentioned on live.37signals.com where David Heinemeier Hansson, creator of Ruby on Rails, has given his praise to Phusion Passenger. Not too long ago, 37signals switched Ta-da List to Phusion Passenger, and are now in the progress of switching more websites.
live.37signals.com isn’t broadcasting right now, but you can find recordings at justin.tv.

Recent changes

Phusion Passenger is under constant maintenance and development. We are pleased to announce Phusion Passenger version 2.0.5. This is mainly a bugfix release. Please read http://blog.phusion.nl/2008/12/05/phusion-passenger-205-released-mentioned-on-live37signalscom/ for the full announcement.

Final

Phusion Passenger is provided to the community for free. If you like Phusion Passenger, please consider sending us a donation. Thanks!

Hongli Lai

Ninh Bui

Tobias Lütke has recently announced that Shopify is now running Phusion Passenger:

“In conclusion: I cannot see any reason to choose a different deployment strategy at this point. Its simple, complete, fast and well documented.” —
Tobias Lütke

Even 37signals is now using Phusion Passenger. They’ve recently announced that they’ve switched Ta-da List to Phusion Passenger:

“We’re really impressed with the ease of deployment and stability under Passenger. The app now requires less than 10 lines of configuration to launch and deploy.” — Joshua Sierles

Recent changes

Phusion Passenger is under constant maintenance and development. We are pleased to announce Phusion Passenger version 2.0.4. This is mainly a bugfix release, but contains one new feature. Please read http://blog.phusion.nl/2008/12/01/phusion-passenger-204-released-37signalss-ta-da-list-now-using-passenger/ for the full announcement.

Final

Phusion Passenger is provided to the community for free. If you like Phusion Passenger, please consider sending us a donation. Thanks!

Hongli Lai

Ninh Bui

Tobias Lütke from Shopify has given us a lot of praise:

“At the same time Passenger introduced some tangible improvements. We switched to enterprise ruby to get the full benefit of the [Copy-On-Write] memory characteristics and we can absolutely confirm the memory savings of 30% some others have reported. This is many thousand dollars of savings even at today’s hardware prices.”

Not only that, 37signals has recently switched Ta-da List to Phusion Passenger. According to DHH, their system administrators have been very content with Phusion Passenger.

But there’s more.

We’ve been talking with DHH from 37signals about a sponsorship campaign for supporting the development of REE. We just received words that all funds have been secured. In the mean time, we had been working hard on developing REE, and so we will be releasing the improvements as well as announcing the sponsors in the very near future. The improvements are, in a nutshell:

• Integration with the RailsBench GC patches, allowing one to tweak the garbage collector for maximum performance.
• Better MacOS X support.
• Better 64-bit support.
• Better Solaris support.

Thank you, 37signals and other sponsors!

Stay tuned for more news.

However, this is now a problem of the past. 37signals has sponsored the development of a new feature in Phusion Passenger called global queuing. Read more about this on blog.phusion.nl.