Mongrel2 is a fast and simple HTTP & WebSocket server that communicates to backend workers via ZeroMQ. It does one thing and does it very well, making it an ideal part of a componentized architecture. The code is event-driven, allowing it to support thousands of concurrent connections and also asynchronous behaviors. These properties are especially important to realtime applications.

Fanout has been one of the most active contributors to the Mongrel2 project over the past year, adding features such as TLS SNI and improved streaming capability. We’ve also been working on making the server easier for people to get started with. And with that, we are proud to announce official packages for Debian and Ubuntu!

You can now install Mongrel2 with a simple apt-get, from either Debian “jessie” (current testing) or Ubuntu “utopic” (upcoming 14.10).

$ sudo apt-get install mongrel2-run

By default the server listens on port 7980. Test it with curl:

$ curl http://localhost:7980/
<html><body>This is an example web page to be served by the mongrel2
web server</body></html>

There are two packages: mongrel2-core which contains the binaries, and mongrel2-run which depends on mongrel2-core and contains startup scripts. The packages are maintained by Jan Niehusmann, who we’ve known for years as the dependable package maintainer of Psi.

We hope you enjoy Mongrel2!