Rails takes care of everything you need in developing and deploying a scalable web application, but developing an entire enterprise level web site often involves more issues that must be addressed by outside applications. Log rotation, process monitoring, database maintenance, and protocol servers are just a few examples. Many times these processes must interact with the application at the Rails level, and come with their own set of challenges.

This talk will guide you through these issues--warning you of the potential pitfalls and enlightening you to the common idioms and best practices of the UNIX world. To do this, we will be following the development of the ActiveRecord based LDAP server. We will go through the basics of connecting to the running Rails application, daemonizing your process, writing init-style scripts to control it, dealing with multiple threads in Rails, configuration files, pid files, testing, and everything else you'll need to get you on your way to building a true production ready web site.