Kirk: a JRuby Rack server based on Jetty

Kirk is a wrapper around Jetty that hides all of the insanity and wraps your Rack application in a loving embrace. Also, Kirk is probably the least HTTP retarded ruby rack server out there.

TL;DR

gem install kirk
rackup -s Kirk config.ru

Features

Here is a brief highlight of some of the features available.

• 0 Downtime deploys: Deploy new versions of your rack application without losing a single request. The basic strategy is similar to Passenger. Touch a magic file in the application root and Kirk will reload the application without dropping a single request... It's just magic.

• Request body streaming: Have a large request body to handle? Why wait until receiving the entire thing before starting the work?

• HTTP goodness: Transfer-Encoding: chunked, Content-Encoding: gzip (and deflate) support on the request.

• Concurrency: As it turns out, it's nice to not block your entire application while waiting for an HTTP request to finish. It's also nice to be able to handle more than 50 concurrent requests without burning over 5GB of RAM. Sure, RAM is cheap, but using Kirk is cheaper ;)

• Run on the JVM: I, for one, am a fan of having a predictable GC, a JIT compiler, and other goodness.

Getting Started

To take advantage of the zero downtime redeploy features, you will need to create a configuration file that describes to Kirk how to start and watch the rack application. You can create the file anywhere. For example, let's say that we are going to put the following configuration file at /path/to/Kirkfile.

# Set the log level to ALL.
log :level => :all

rack "/path/to/my/rackup/config.ru" do
  # Set the host and / or port that this rack application will
  # be available on. This defaults to "0.0.0.0:9090"
  listen 80

  # Set the host names that this rack application wll be available
  # on. This defaults to "*"
  hosts "example.com", "*.example.org"

  # Set the file that controls the redeploys. This is relative to
  # the applications root (the directory that the rackup file lives
  # in). Touch this file to redepoy the application.
  watch "REVISION"
end

rack "/path/to/another/rackup/config.ru" do
  # More settings here
end

Once you have Kirk configured, start it up with the following command:

kirk -c /path/to/Kirkfile

... and you're off.

Daemonizing Kirk

Use your OS features. For example, write an upstart script or use start-stop-daemon.

Logging to a file or syslog

Kirk just dumps logs to stdout, so just pipe Kirk to logger.

Caveats

This is still a pretty new project and a lot of settings that should be abstracted are still hardcoded in the source.

• Kirk requires JRuby 1.6.0 RC 1 or greater. This is due to a JRuby bug that was fixed in the 1.6 branch but never backported to older versions of JRuby. Crazy stuff happens without the bug fix.

• There is a memory leak if you are reloading an application that uses any of the JDBC gems. This should be fixed on JRuby master but not the JRuby 1.6.0 RC 1 release.

  UPDATE: There still seems to be a leak on master.

Getting Help

Ping me (carllerche) on Freenode in #carlhuda

Reporting Bugs

Just post them to the Github repository's issue tracker.