Just figured out something very humerous. I’ve just launched a new website that is written in Rails and I got it working with FCGID and Apache2. Works really well. During development I made use of print, puts, p and the other stdout printing functions to output to the console windows that WebBrick runs in. This works great considering that I haven’t really gotten too far into Ruby debugging and unit tests just can’t cover everything.

Needless to say, I should have been using the logger that is available to all ActiveController classes, but the amount of logging in the development.log file gets really excessive. Anyways, there’s is a slight issue with using the stdout methods when you convert over to use Apache and FastCGI or FCGID instead of WebBrick. The issue is that stdout seems to be redirected to the apache mod, which directly feeds back into Apache and then back to the browser. So, what could happen is that your print statements look like HTTP headers to Apache. This of course explodes violently in the Apache error.log file. Quite humerous. Perhaps a better solution is to redirect stdout to the logger or capture stdout in production mode and log errors to the logs or something.

Anyways, just something to watch out for.