What is the significance of the dispatch.fcgi file in Rails

Question

Hi,

There is a file under public folder in Rails environment called dispatch.fcgi. What is the significance of this particular file?

I opened that file and it has this

#   # Default log path, 50 requests between GC.
#   RailsFCGIHandler.process! nil, 50
#
#   # Custom log path, normal GC behavior.
#   RailsFCGIHandler.process! '/var/log/myapp_fcgi_crash.log'
#
require File.dirname(__FILE__) + "/../config/environment"
require 'fcgi_handler'

RailsFCGIHandler.process!

Cannot understand what this does. Can someone please explain?

Answer 1

That must be an old version of rails, because this file is a relic for servers which start the rails app with fcgi in your http server.

Apache and Nginx are now supported via passenger, or you can use a proxy with a mongrels cluster, all these solutions don't need a dispatch.fcgi.

http://serverfault.com/questions/60222/apache-dispatch-fcgi-doesnt-get-interpreted-with-passenger