Despite the great strides in the Virtualization Support of Fedora, I still prefer the polished capabilities of VMware Server.  In fact, I will happily install VMware on any big, beefy Fedora Linux box I can get my hands on.  In my opinion, the Virtualization Group in Fedora's Yum Repository (i.e Xen Kernel, KVM, and Qemu) are still in need of fine-tuning, and aren't quite ready for use in a reliable setting.

Software professionals need reliability for their environments -- we have enough bugs and infrastructure quirks to deal with in our own solutions to need to diagnose and debug an entire Host or Guest Operating System environment!    We'll play with Xen and the other Virtualization Toys on our personal machines later, but for now, to keep things humming along on the bleeding edge, I'd rather eliminate a potential point-of-failure and work with something that's polished, mature, and freely available:  VMware Server.

The goal of this article is to create a "Production-Quality" Rails Server. Thus, the best possible technologies (strictly my opinion) have been selected at the time of this writing to achieve this goal.

Unlike other developers, I prefer to install my Rails Applications under Web Subdirectories, such as http://www.not404.com/MyRailsApp, instead of running it as a Root Application of a Web Root, such as http://MyRailsApp.not404.com/. These instructions are geared for how I lay things out, but will let you know what to adjust in order to run your Rails Apps as traditional Web-Root Applications.

You may also notice that these instructions are SQLite3-oriented. This is intentional. IMHO, it's better to use the simplest-case database to prove that everything else is properly stitched together. Then, once you're satisfied that everything is properly locked down and performance-tuned, you can focus your attention on tying your Rails Application to a real database.

Blecch! I absolutely HATE the xdg (Well-Known Folders) feature because it pollutes the Home Directory with directories I don't use. Furthermore, these are auto-created upon each GUI-Login, so you can't just delete them. The configuration-file adjustment below prevents Fedora from auto-creating the following nuisance subdirectories:

• Documents
• Download
• Music
• Pictures
• Public
• Templates
• Videos