To enable Passenger, edit any of your fully hosted domains or add a new domain from the Manage Domains area in the web panel, and check the Ruby on Rails Passenger (mod_rails) checkbox.

When you then point that domain’s web directory to the public directory of an existing Ruby on Rails application it will work automatically.

More info in the wiki: Passenger.

We would love to hear any feedback on the new setup.

According to their website, Phusion Passenger makes deployment of applications built on the Ruby on Rails web framework a breeze, because:

• Deployment is only a matter of uploading application files. No Ruby on Rails-specific server configuration required.
• Built on the industry standard Apache web server.
• Zero maintenance. No port management, server process monitoring or stale file cleanup required. Errors are automatically recovered whenever possible.
• Designed for performance, stability and security. Passenger should never crash Apache even in case of crashing Rails applications.
• Well-documented, for both system administrators and developers.

I’m very happy to see DreamHost continue to be involved in the Ruby on Rails community. DreamHost was one of the first major host to support Rails, and even though Rails deployment has been a challenge for a lot of hosting companies, I definitely think this is a point were DreamHost has the chance to differentiate themselves from their competitors.

Currently I have no information about when mod_rails will be available on DreamHost servers. Please write a comment if you have any additional info.

Hat tip: Jamie

Rails 2.0 was released about a month ago and contains new features, loads of fixes and an incredible amount of polish.

The official Rails blog has an article describing a number of the more interesting new features in the release which appears to be quite extensive.

rails.dreamhosters.com have a list of all the updated gems and their new version numbers.

I briefly mentioned the book back in February, when they were giving away the first four chapters, but this time it’s the entire book (12 chapters – 447 pages) you can download.

The book covers everything from installing Ruby, Rails and MySQL (well I guess DreamHost does this part for you), to building and deploying a fully featured web application.

The offer has already been very popular and the book has now been downloaded more than 50.000 times.

The giveaway expires by the end of November.

DreamHost is now running Rails version 1.2.3 and Ruby version 1.8.5.

This update in mainly a maintenance release making Rails compatible with the newest version of Ruby (1.8.6).

Only two new gems has been added in this update: ruby-debug and tzinfo. ruby-debug is a command line interface for ruby-debug-base (a replacement for drb breakpointer) and tzinfo is a daylight-savings aware timezone library.

The following gems have been upgraded in the same process: actionmailer (1.3.3), actionpack (1.13.3), actionwebservice (1.2.3), activerecord (1.15.3), activesupport (1.4.2), rake (0.7.3).

The tutorial is in fact two chapters (chapter 3 and 4) from their new Ruby on Rails book: Build Your Own Ruby On Rails Web Applications by Patrick Lenz. You can also download the first 4 chapters as a PDF file (pdf).

The book shows you how to develop a Web 2.0 social news application (like digg.com) with Rails 1.2 (the version DreamHost is currently rolling out) and requires no knowledge of neither Ruby nor Rails.

If you like the sample you can buy the book (12 chapters) for $29.95 for the PDF edition or $39.95 (+ shipping) for the hard copy book.

The main features of the new Rails 1.2 is the REST (and general HTTP appreciation) support (e.g. mime types, HTTP status codes, etc.) and multibyte-safe UTF-8 support.

If you’re running the popular Rails blogging engine Typo, you’re encouraged to freeze Rails immediately. If you’re running other critical applications you might want to freeze your Rails as well to avoid any complications until you’ve tested the new version.

A number of new gems are also currently being rolled out: ajax_scaffold_generator (generator for ajaxified scaffolds), camping (miniature rails), gruff (beautiful graphs for one or multiple datasets), hoe (write Rakefiles easier and cleaner) and unicode (unicode normalization library).

Finally a number of gems have been upgraded: actionmailer (1.2.5), actionpack (1.12.5), actionwebservice (1.1.6), activerecord (1.14.4), acts_as_taggable (2.0.2), capistrano (1.3.1), daemons (1.0.3), ferret (0.10.13), gen (0.41.0), geoip (0.3.0), glue (0.41.0), nitro (0.41.0), og (0.41.0), ParseTree (1.6.3), rubyforge (0.4.0) and RubyInline (3.6.2).

For a complete list of installed gems, check out http://rails.dreamhosters.com.

Updated:

According to DreamHost Imagemagick is currently being upgraded to version 6.2.4 and Subversion is being upgraded to version 1.3.2.

While Ruby has been upgraded on some servers, they are deploying the new version on a slow rate, since the new version might break the breakpoint feature in Rails. Take a look a t the call_stack gem for a workaround.

Kudos to DreamHost for completing this upgrade within a few hours of the release of this security patch.

Updated:
DreamHost has upgraded Rails to 1.1.6 since another mandatory upgrade has already been released.

Aiden Bordner has written a short tutorial about Getting Typo 4 running on DreamHost and LabRatZ has blogged about his steps to migrate from Typo 2.6.0 to 4.0.0 on DreamHost. Finally there’s a helpful tip in the CactusWax blog.