While mod_ruby is perfect to serve dynamic Ruby web pages, the project looks like its long dead; given that it hasn’t been updated for over 4 years now. Now the de facto way to deploy Ruby on Rails applications is Phusion Passenger. Compared to mod_ruby, configuring the Phusion Passenger (mod_rails) Apache module is ridiculously easy to do. Essentially all I had to do is download and install the gem.

The only quirk, which was entirely my fault for being lazy, was not reading the portion of the documentation where it mentions that the default environment is set to production. This gave me quite a headache as I couldn’t figure out why I had to restart Apache every time I modified any controller code (RoR noob).

My fix:
.htaccess
RailsEnv development

I’m amazed on Phusion’s work, the company responsible for the module. As they’ve take something that’s been historically difficult to deploy (at least I think) and made it really simple.
http://www.modrails.com/