Phusion Blog

Phusion Passenger is an Apache module for deploying Ruby on Rails web applications, and is mainly focused on ease of use and stability. Since its first release in April 2008, it has gained quite a lot of attention from the Rails community, and nowadays it has become a very popular deployment tool.

We have recently been mentioned on live.37signals.com where David Heinemeier Hansson, creator of Ruby on Rails, has given his praise to Phusion Passenger. Not too long ago, 37signals switched Ta-da List to Phusion Passenger, and are now in the progress of switching more websites.
live.37signals.com isn’t broadcasting right now, but you can find recordings at justin.tv.

Recent changes

Phusion Passenger is under constant maintenance and development. We are pleased to announce Phusion Passenger version 2.0.5. This is mainly a bugfix release.

Fixed global queuing compatibility with the worker MPM

The global queuing feature that was introduced in version 2.0.4 was found to cause deadlocks when used in combination with the worker MPM of Apache. This problem only occurs when global queuing is used in combination with the worker MPM; users of the prefork MPM (i.e. most Apache users) are not affected.

This problem has been fixed.

Ruby on Rails 2.3’s Rack adapter now supported

Ruby on Rails 2.3 hasn’t been released yet, but we’ve already added support for it. In Rails 2.3, the old CGI-based dispatcher will be removed in favor of the new Rack-based dispatcher. Phusion Passenger will automatically use this new Rack-based dispatcher upon detecting Rails 2.3.

Fixed compilation problems with Ruby 1.8.7

The title says it all.

Various other bug fixes and stability improvements

These are too minor to mention in this announcement, but interested people can take a look at the commit list.

How do I upgrade to 2.0.5?

Via a gem

Please install it with the following command:

gem install passenger

Next, run:

passenger-install-apache2-module

Please don’t forget to copy & paste the Apache config snippet that the installer gives you.

Via a native Linux package

John Leach from Brightbox has kindly provided an Ubuntu 8.04 package for Phusion Passenger. The package is available from the Brightbox repository which you can find at:

http://apt.brightbox.net

Add the following line to the Third Party Software Sources:

deb http://apt.brightbox.net hardy main

(The simplest way to do that is to create a file in /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ containing the deb instruction, and then run ‘apt-get update‘).

Once you’ve done this then you can install Phusion Passenger by running:

apt-get install libapache2-mod-passenger

(Note that John is currently packaging 2.0.5, so it might take a while before this release shows up in the apt repository.)

Final

Phusion Passenger is provided to the community for free. If you like Phusion Passenger, please consider sending us a donation. Thanks!

Hongli Lai

Ninh Bui