This site used to be hosted at bluehost.com, but is now running on my own reasonably speedy Mac Mini running OS X.  Bluehost is not a bad hosting provider, for the most part.  But they upgraded to Rails 2.0 without notice, which broke Typo 4.0.  I should have frozen the Rails version into Typo, and perhaps the Bluehost fine print includes something about doing system upgrades without notice.  I was also not pleased with having to run FastCGI.

So, I upgraded to Typo 5 and moved away from the shared hosting environment.  I also used the opportunity to become familiar with configuring a Rails production environment using a few popular industrial strength components, namely:  Nginx, mongrel, and mongrel cluster. 

I chose Nginx as the web server/reverse proxy component because 1) it appears to be very lightweight and fast, and 2) configuring and managing Apache can be very tiresome.  The basic set-up has the mongrel cluster managing the spawning of multiple mongrel processes ("mongrels"), with Nginx load balancing and round robin'ing requests to the mongrels.

Here are the steps I took to do it.  On OS X, Xcode must be installed.

1. Install Rails 2.0, mongrel, mongrel cluster, and the mysql native bindings gem.  I used the standard 'gem install --include-dependencies {gem-name}' to get these.  Rails should probably be frozen to the application itself.
2. Download and build Nginx.  Instructions and more info can be found here: Nginx, my new favorite front end for mongrel cluster.  One issue I ran into was that PCRE could not be found during the configure step.  This article helped me install it.
3. Edit nginx.conf.  Again, the article mentioned above is a good reference.  The key section is where the "upstream mongrels" are declared.  To properly configure Nginx to start on boot, etc., refer to this article.
4. Download Typo 5.  Configure the mongrel cluster at the application root:  mongrel_rails cluster::configure -e production -p 3000 -a 127.0.0.1 -N 3  This will create a config file that will be included to actually kick off the cluster.  The -p 3000 sets the port and must match the "upstream mongrel" declaration in nginx.conf.  In this instance, three (-N 3) mongrel processes are spawned.  The mongrel cluster is started at the application root with:  mongrel_rails cluster::start  
5. There were some manual edits and stylesheet replacements I did to retain what this site looked like in Typo 4...not too interesting to include the mundane details.
6. Import the existing Typo database:  mysql -uroot -p ossolab_typo < ossolab_typo.sql
7. Run a migration at application root to reflect the changed model in Typo 5:  rake db:migrate RAILS_ENV=production   This actually failed for me with a strange mysql related error message:  dyld: Library not loaded: /usr/local/mysql/lib/mysql/libmysqlclient.15.dylib   I did some research and was able to proceed by creating a folder named 'mysql' in /usr/local/mysql/lib/ and then copying 'libmysqlclient.15.dylib' to it.
8. The one disappointment I had was that managing the sidebars after the upgrade was broken.  Not wanting to spend anymore time on the issue, I got around it by getting rid of the sidebar records from Typo 4, since they aren't a huge deal to me.  The recent comments section on the right was added by directly writing that code in one of the view files.