I got sick of Schemas, migrations and versions of SQL. So I decided I want an alternative. There is couchDB for one. I'm going to give it a try. Watch this space for updates on my progress. Meanwhile, leave your comments if you know of any alternatives.

PS: There is also node but I am yet to verify if it fits the purpose.

A few days back my slice started giving me warnings about heavy swap usage and my websites started crawling dead slow despite very low traffic. top gave me the answer I needed. Apache is eating away a lot of memory without doing anything. I've been hearing a good deal about nginx and wanted to give it a try.

Recently I've been working on a rails project and needed to deploy it. Looking at rails guides pointed me to passenger for nginx. How ever the nginx ebuild for portage doesn't support passenger. Some one has raised a bug#266446 and created a patch for adding passenger use flag to nginx. There is one small catch though, it raises a sandbox violation error. Besides it needs passenger to be installed using ruby gem. A quick scan at the end of the build log showed the error. nginx is trying to prepare passenger through some rake task and causing the error.

I decided to write an ebuild for passenger and prepare it for nginx. A quick google search and looking at a couple of other ebuilds threw up a standard ebuild template for gem installations. A simple rake task later I got my passenger-2.2.5.ebuild and a patch for nginx ebuild to go with it.

They are up on Gentoo bugzilla, grab them and place them in your overlay.