Native Rails/FastCGI on DreamHost!
DreamHost has unofficially started to support Ruby on Rails and FastCGI. There’s been a thread on their programming discussion board about this and someone from DH said FastCGI is now available but they haven’t made a formal announcement yet. Setting up things is pretty straightforward. In the DreamHost Control Panel select ‘Domains > Web’ and choose to edit ‘http’ on the domain you want to use Rails with. Then tick ‘FastCGI Support?’ and make you web directory point to the ‘public’ sub-directory in your Rails project directory.
The next step is to edit ‘.htaccess’ in ‘public’. Change RewriteBase to ‘/dispatch.fcgi’ and alter the last ReWrite rule so it also points to dispatch.fcgi. That’s it your Rails app should now run. If you were running off your own copy of Ruby (like I was) remember to change where your dispatch.fcgi finds Ruby (change the first line).
I also noticed that the value in ‘RAILS_ENV’ wasn’t getting picked up so I altered config/environment.rb to use the production, instead of the development environment by default.
