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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-17T18:18:41+00:00

We’re looking at some alternatives to our Tomcat based stack for a JRuby on

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We’re looking at some alternatives to our Tomcat based stack for a JRuby on Rails app.

So far I’ve read about the Trinidad gem, which is actually Tomcat based, and the Glassfish gem. I can’t however for either of these find production examples. Both of them it seems allow you to just run the command on command line, which is fine for local dev, but how do people use these solutions in production?

There doesn’t seem to be much action on the Glassfish gem these days, though it’s highly touted for being small and fast.

Does anyone have another setup that they find to be performant, robust and easy to deploy for a JRuby on Rails app?

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  1. Editorial Team

    Trinidad gem / Embedded Tomcat

    If you dig deeper into the Trinidad gem page on Github there are links to the various Trinidad extension gems. There is a daemonizing gem specifically supplied for use in production here:

    http://github.com/calavera/trinidad_daemon

    If you execute the install script and answer a handful of simple questions, it generates a tailored init script for your Ubuntu or OS X machine. That’s pretty much all you need.

    There are also example init scripts in the wiki here:

    http://github.com/calavera/trinidad_daemon_extension/wiki/init.d-scripts

    Note that for use in the Rails.threadsafe! mode, both min and max JRuby runtimes are set to 1 in your trinidad.yml configuration file.

    I have it working on Ubuntu with an Nginx frontend, and it’s working very nicely.

    So yes, this means that you use the command line to stop and start the application server, but the init script will also be called automatically on system startup. The wiki also includes some Capistrano deploy script examples, so you can even have the server stop and start from your own machine.

    Note: There are two daemon extensions. The one I have linked to is the new one, which uses a better daemonizing library.

    GlassFish gem

    You’re right, the GlassFish gem isn’t getting so much love right now, but I daresay things will improve. There are a couple of issues running it with JRuby 1.5+ because the gem didn’t keep up with changes in JRuby, however I wrote about how to work around the issues here: http://www.scottlowe.eu/deploying-rails-3-with-jruby-daemonized-glass

    Since writing that GlassFish post, Trinidad has gained the power to be dependably daemonized, so it’s probably the smoother path to take today.

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