Hi Im totally new to deploying rails apps and slightly green to administering servers though command line is ok.

I have a rails app (2.3.2) which needs a sales site and blog for which im using wordpress.

Id like

www.example.com
www.example.com/tour
www.example.com/pricing
www.example.com/blog

to be all done via wordpress

and www.app.example.com to be my rails app.

So my questions are

1) Does this wordpress / rails setup demand I use specific software e.g. nginx over apache?

2) How do i setup the subdomain and install the rails app to be linked to it?

Can anyone can provide some pointers, terms to search for, tutorials etc re this???

There isn't really any special configuration you should be able to use Apache to handle both applications, using different virtual hosts. Read the tutorials on LAMP and Rails/Passenger. And you will need a cname pointing the subdomain to the host.