Phusion Blog

This is it, the first Release Candidate (internally named “pre 4”). A few more bugs have been fixed since beta 3, but if no more serious bugs are found then the next release will be 3.0.0 final.

What’s new

Autodetection of Ruby tool commands now take exe extension, –program-prefix and –program-suffix into account

Phusion Passenger had a pretty elaborate way of searching the system for Ruby tool commands like ‘gem’, ‘rake’, etc. The reason why all this search code exists is because the problem is much more complicated than just searching for “rake” in $PATH. A significant number of people have multiple Ruby versions installed on their system; let’s call these Ruby A and Ruby B. They run the Phusion Passenger installer with Ruby A and they installed the required gems with Ruby A’s RubyGems, but they have a Rake in $PATH that belongs to Ruby B. If we were to naively use the Rake in $PATH then the wrong Rake will be invoked and they would wonder why the gems they just installed aren’t detected. Our Ruby tool search code tries very hard to find the Rake that belongs to the Ruby interpreter that’s currently running.

However the code didn’t take the exe extension into consideration, as well as the –program-prefix and –program-suffix that Ruby could be configured with. For example, on some systems the Ruby command is called “ruby1.8” and Rake is called “rake1.8”. Similarly, the default JRuby binary distribution calls Rake “jrake”. We’ve now updated our search code to take this into account as well. Issue #537.

Usability and ease of installation remains to be one of our biggest goals. As you can see we’ve gone through great lengths to make sure that everything works as expected and that everything is as fool-proof as possible, even if the system might not be entirely correctly configured.

Fixed linking problems on some systems

Phusion Passenger uses math functions such as pow(). On some systems — .e.g. NetBSD, some versions of Solaris and some Linux distros — this requires Phusion Passenger to be linked to the Math library. Issue #539.

Phusion Passenger Standalone fix

When Phusion Passenger Standalone is daemonized with -d, it exits with a non-zero exit code. This has been fixed. Issue #536.

Preferred PCRE version upgraded to version 8.10

passenger-install-nginx-module automatically installs PCRE for you in case you didn’t already have it.

Installation/upgrade

First install the latest Phusion Passenger gem:

gem install passenger --pre

(Or you can download the tarball.)

If you want to install or upgrade the Apache or Nginx version, then run the installer as you’re used to:

passenger-install-apache2-module
passenger-install-nginx-module

At the end the installer will tell you to paste a configuration snippet. If you’re upgrading then replace the old snippet with the new one.

If you want to run Phusion Passenger Standalone, then run:

cd /path-to-your-app
passenger start

No special upgrade instructions needed.

The documentation

Users guide for Apache
Users guide for Nginx
Users guide for Standalone