Rackup

rackup provides a command line interface for running a Rack-compatible application. It also provides a generic interface for starting a rack-compatible server: Handler. It is not designed for production use.

Installation

-- For Puma
$ gem install rackup puma

-- For Falcon
$ gem install rackup falcon

Usage

In a directory with your config.ru simply run the command:

$ rackup

Your application should now be available locally, typically http://localhost:9292.

Server Handler

You can also use Handler to start a server programmatically:

require 'rackup'

# Use the default server:
handler = Rackup::Handler.default
handler.run(app, **options)

# Use a specific server:
handler = Rackup::Handler.get('puma')
handler.run(app, **options)

Do not require specific handlers or assume they will exist/work. Instead, use the default method to get the best available handler.

(Soft) Deprecation

For a long time, rackup (the executable and implementation) was part of rack, and webrick was the default server, included with Ruby. It made it easy to run a Rack application without having to worry about the details of the server - great for documentation and demos.

When webrick was removed from the Ruby standard library, rack started depending on webrick as a default server. Every web application and server would pull in webrick as a dependency, even if it was not used. To avoid this, the rackup component of rack was moved to this gem, which depended on webrick.

However, many libraries (e.g. rails) still depend on rackup and end up pulling in webrick as a dependency. To avoid this, the decision was made to cut webrick as a dependency of rackup. This means that rackup no longer depends on webrick, and you need to install it separately if you want to use it.

As a consequence of this, the value of the rackup gem is further diminished. In other words, why would you do this:

$ gem install rackup puma
$ rackup ...

when you can do this:

$ gem install puma
$ puma ...

In summary, the maintainers of rack recommend the following:

• Libraries should not depend on rackup if possible. rackup as an executable made sense when webrick shipped with Ruby, so there was always a fallback. But that hasn't been true since Ruby 3.0.
• Frameworks and applications should focus on providing config.ru files, so that users can use the webserver program of their choice directly (e.g. puma, falcon).
• There is still some value in the generic rackup and Handler interfaces, but we encourage users to invoke the server command directly if possible.
• Webrick should be avoided if possible.

Contributing

We welcome contributions to this project.

1. Fork it.
2. Create your feature branch (git checkout -b my-new-feature).
3. Commit your changes (git commit -am 'Add some feature').
4. Push to the branch (git push origin my-new-feature).
5. Create new Pull Request.