I've moved my site over to a FreeBSD virtual machine running under a VMWare server generously provided by my employer. I decided I'd upgrade to the latest version of Typo, the software that powers this site, and use Apache 2.2 + Mongrel to serve it up rather than FastCGI or something. There are FreeBSD ports for all of this software: www/apache22, www/typo, and www/rubygem-mongrel.
After moving my MySQL database over, setting up my config/database.yml, and upgrading my schema with rake db:migrate in the Typo directory installed by the port, I was able to fire up Mongrel and start serving pages. However, I didn't want to have to start up Mongrel by hand with a bunch of command line options. I wanted a configuration file and a startup script that would get run automatically at system boot time. So I made them.
Here is my configuration file for Mongrel. I put this in /usr/local/www/typo-4.0.3/config/mongrel.yml. And this is my startup script, which I put in /usr/local/etc/rc.d/typo. You then just put typo_enable="YES" in your /etc/rc.conf, and you can control Mongrel+Typo with /usr/local/etc/rc.d/typo start|stop|restart. This script and config file can easily be adapted for using other Rails apps with Mongrel, too.
