Section 3. Getting Started

Now that you know what Mongrel is all about, let's start using it. You can install it with a single command and configure it with just one more. This section will walk you through the basic usage. We'll dig into configurations in Section 4.

These examples assume you will be using Mongrel to serve a Rails application. If that's not the case, and you're using one of the other supported frameworks or plan to use Mongrel for your own custom application, you'll still want to follow along and pay close attention. Even though Mongrel is framework-agnostic, most of the community currently uses it to run Rails applications, so the best-tested and most mature commands, handlers, filters, and plugins are all Rails-related. The other supported frameworks follow similar patterns to get Mongrel running. If you're planning to extend Mongrel yourself (it's easy!) see Section 6.

In our examples we also assume you are using a flavor of Unix. Mongrel is fully supported on Windows, so in most cases the examples will work without modification. Please see Section 3.3 and the Mongrel Web site (http://mongrel.rubyforge.org) for details on Win32-specific limitations or differences.