By Zed A. Shaw

Mongrel2 Has A Complete Manual Now

It has been about 2 months since I started Mongrel2 and tonight I finished a rough first draft of the manual. This manual covers all of the features we have right now and goes to great lengths to make sure that you can install, deploy, manage, and hack on Mongrel2. I made it fun to read, have lots of examples, and be as complete as possible without overloading you. When you're done, you will know as much about Mongrel2 as anyone could possibly know right now without being me.

It's also full of little jabs, jokes, and tiny rants about important topics so you'll definitely find something to keep you interested.

You can read the first draft of the manual in HTML and PDF formats and probably the PDF is the better of the two if you're going to get serious. There will be some layout issues with the PDF and definitely some problems with grammar and spelling.

What the book covers is:

  • Introduction to Mongrel2.
  • Installing Mongrel2 from nothing, including all the Python gear.
  • Managing Managing configurations and deployments using the m2sh config tool.
  • Deploying a small real example (the one running mongrel2.org) from scratch using a small daemontools replacement I wrote just for the book called procer.
  • Hacking on Mongrel2 applications with handlers in Python and in other languages or creating your own handler API in your language of choice.
  • Contributing to the project if you want to help.

All of the things in the manual actually work, and have been tested and are running our live site and a few others. This means that we have worked out all the features needed to actually use Mongrel2 to make something. It is still missing many important features like SSL and needs to be tightened a whole lot more, but for 2 months of work this is a bad ass piece of kit.

We've also got two contributors agartrell and wink who are helping out and I'd like to thank them, and everyone else hanging out #mongrel2 on irc.freenode.org for watching me make the sausage.

As with all things this new, there will be bugs, but at least our buggy open source web server has a lot of useful cohesive documentation.