Why we use unicorn
January 20, 2012 § Leave a comment
Recently a colleague asked me why we used unicorn, obviously I answered “because its awesome”, however this didn’t seem to suffice. So rather then explaining I thought I’d write this post:
In the almost 6 years that I have worked at Mint we have ran our rails applications using a variety of software. Back in the dark early days we used fast_cgi under apache, luckily we moved on quickly to thin, behind nginx, a web server we have since stuck to. However from thin we moved to mongrel when Zed showed us the awesome and then finally to unicorn. I miss out a brief stage where we entertained the idea of using passenger, but fortunately this never made it onto our production servers. Unicorn has been part of our stack for longer than all of the others put together and this in itself is interesting.