taken from http://rubyists.com/articles/2005/05/03/spawn-fcgi-in-the-foreground: spawn-fcgi in the foreground! by Bougyman Tue, 03 May 2005 11:00:00 GMT Been looking for a clean way to spawn fastcgi listeners in the foreground and I believe Trey has figured it out. This patch should take care of it by keeping spawn-fcgi from losing track of the copied listening processes and allow full supervison. To use, call your cgi-fcgi -start -connect $host:$port script with the -supervise option, like: cgi-fcgi -start -supervise -connect 127.0.0.1:1791 /path/to/dispatch.fcgi Full Supervise run script becomes #!/bin/sh RAIL_NUMBER=$(basename $PWD|awk -F'-' '{print $2}') RAILS_HOST=$(<env/RAILS_HOST) RAILS_ROOT=$(<env/RAILS_ROOT) RAILS_PORT=179$RAIL_NUMBER exec envdir ./env \ cgi-fcgi -supervise -start -connect \ $RAILS_HOST:$RAILS_PORT \ $RAILS_ROOT/public/dispatch.fcgi This would be in a script called ‘run’ in your ~/service/someapp-$RAIL_NUMBER directory, where $RAIL_NUMBER is 1-99. The references to ./env require a directory named ‘env’ to be set up in the same directory as the run script. This should have at least 3 files in it: RAILS_ROOT => contains one line that is the full path to your rails root directory. RAILS_ENV => contains one word, either ‘production’ or ‘development’ RAILS_HOST => contains one IP address or FQDN You can set any other environment variables in this way by simply creating a file with the variable name and its contents will become the value of that environment variable. Because of the envdir ./env call before the cgi-fcgi call, your rails application has access to any variables set in this way.