Phusion Blog

Phusion Passenger is an Apache and Nginx module for deploying Ruby on Rails web applications, and is mainly focused on ease of use and stability. It is under constant maintenance and development. We are pleased to announce Phusion Passenger version 2.2.6. This is a bug fix release.

This will be one of the last 2.2.x releases. Next in the pipeline is 3.0. We believe that all the upcoming changes will be well worth the version number bump. But more about this in a later blog post. 🙂

Anyway, the following things have changed since 2.2.5:

Fixed compatibility with /tmp cleaners such as tmpwatch

Some /tmp cleaner programs such as tmpwatch try to remove subdirectories in /tmp/passenger.xxx after a while because they think those subdirectories are unused. This could cause Phusion Passenger to malfunction, requiring a web server restart. Measures have now been taken to prevent those tmp cleaner programs from removing anything in /tmp/passenger.xxx. Issue #365.

Autodetection now gives more priority to Rack than to Rails

When autodetecting the application type, Rack is now given more priority than Rails. This allows one to drop a config.ru file in a Rails directory and have it detected as a Rack application instead of a Rails application. Patch contributed by Sam Pohlenz: issue #338.

Increased default socket backlog

The default socket backlog has been increased from ‘SOMAXCONN’ (which is 128 on most platforms) to 1024. This should fix most ‘helper_server.sock failed: Resource temporarily unavailable’ errors.

Apache fixes

The location of the ‘apxs’ and ‘apr-config’ commands can now also be passed to the installer through the –apxs-path and –apr-config-path parameters, in addition to the $APXS2 and $APR_CONFIG environment variables. Issue #3.

Nginx fixes and changes

Various problems that only occur on 64-bit platforms (such as Snow Leopard) have been fixed.

The installer now installs Nginx 0.7.64 by default.

Various other fixes

Fixed compilation problems on Solaris. Issue #369 and issue #379.

Fixed crashes on PowerPC.

Some Ruby 1.9 compatibility fixes. Issue #398.

The installer now displays correct dependency installation instructions for Mandriva Linux.

How do I upgrade to 2.2.6?

Via a gem

Please install it with the following command:

gem install passenger

Next, run:

passenger-install-apache2-module

Or, if you’re an Nginx user:

passenger-install-nginx-module

Please don’t forget to copy & paste the Apache/Nginx 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:

sudo apt-get install libapache2-mod-passenger

-or-

sudo apt-get install nginx-brightbox

(Note that John is currently packaging 2.2.6, 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. Thank you!