Today Passenger or mod_rails was released, and is supposed to be easier to work with, and have better performance than mongrel with mod_proxy. Definitely a must look for virtualmin!
ditto! i had tons of problems with mongrail, including process lockups, high cpu consuption and huge memory leaks.
i just switched to passenger and it works like a charm.
It’s coming. In fact, I’m proudly wearing my Phusion T-shirt at this very moment that I received when Virtualmin, Inc. contributed a chunk of cash to the mod_rails project. We’ve never loved mongrel–it’s a fine piece of code, but it’s a solution to the wrong problem for most hosting environments, and we’re happy to see a better deployment solution for rails.
I expect I’ll get packages into the repos in the next week or two, and Jamie will have support added to Virtualmin a week or two after that. It’ll take quite a bit of testing before we consider it a “stable” feature…but because deploying under mod_rails is dramatically simpler than under mongrel, it should be more reliable and predictable in the long run.
Joe, any update on this? Just got a Joyent Accelerator and would love to use Passenger. 
mod_rails ?? for apache ?? I don’t even see this in the debian repo.
Hey Joe,
How is this project coming along? If I manually install the gem and run their little apache installer with that work or will that do bad things to my virtualmin server?
Letting everyone know that I got it working manually. Very straight forward. I am running debian 6.
Steps:
Uninstall previously installed rubies packages: apt-get remove ruby1.8 ri1.8
Install rvm https://rvm.beginrescueend.com/
Be sure to add the stuff to .bash_profile (documented on the rvm site)
rvm install 1.9.2 or whatever ruby version you want
rvm --default 1.9.2
gem install passenger
passenger-install-apache2
Create a file in mods-available (debian) or else add the stuff to http.conf
be sure the mods are enabled and restart
point the document root in virtualmin to the your rack/rails app public folder
add the directory option -MultiViews thing
It works! On multiple virtual hosts too!