Phusion Blog

Phusion Passenger is an Apache and Nginx module for deploying Ruby web applications. It has a strong focus on ease of use, stability and performance. Phusion Passenger is built on top of tried-and-true, battle-hardened Unix technologies, yet at the same time introduces innovations not found in most traditional Unix servers. Since version 3.0 it can also run standalone without an external web server, making it not only easier for first-time users but also ideal on development environments.

What’s new compared to 2.2

Phusion Passenger 3 is a major new release and brings about many, many improvements in the areas of performance, features and stability. It is fully compatible with the latest technologies such as Rails 3.0, Ruby 1.9.2, RVM and Bundler.

You can read about the improvements in Phusion Passenger 3 through a set of articles that we had written on this subject:

• Technology Preview 1: Performance
  Phusion Passenger 3 can be up to 55% faster than Phusion Passenger 2.2.
• Technology Preview 2: Stability, robustness, availability, self-healing
  We’ve implemented many safeguards to keep Phusion Passenger stable and running as much as possible.
• Technology Preview 3: Closing the gap between development and production & rethinking the word “easy”
  Describes how Phusion Passenger’s usage model differs from Mongrel’s, Thin’s and Unicorn’s and when one would prefer our model over the other and vice versa.
  Introduces Phusion Passenger Standalone (formerly called Phusion Passenger Lite) which can be used as a potentially improved replacement for Mongrel, Thin and Unicorn.
• Technology Preview 4: Adding new features and removing old limitations
• Bonus article: Phusion Passenger & running multiple Ruby versions

What’s new compared to 3.0.0 RC 1

[Apache] `passenger-install-apache2-module –snippet` no longer prints ANSI color codes

This makes it possible to pipe its output directly to a config file. Fixes issue #548.

[Apache] Fixed thread stack size problems on FreeBSD

Previously it might crash for bizarre reasons.

[Nginx] Upgraded to Nginx 0.8.52 by default

This is because Nginx 0.8 has recently become the stable release series.

[Standalone] Fixed Unix domain socket support

There was a bug in Phusion Passenger Standalone which would cause the `-S` option to fail.

How do I upgrade to 3.0.0?

Via a gem

First install the gem with the following command:

gem install passenger

If you’re using Phusion Passenger for Apache or for Nginx, then re-run the Apache or Nginx module installer, whichever is appropriate:

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

At the end the installer will tell you to paste a configuration snippet into your web server config file. Replace the old snippet that you already had with this new one.

Phusion Passenger Standalone users don’t need to run anything else. Whenever you type

passenger start

it will automatically upgrade itself.

Via a native Linux package

John Leach from Brightbox has kindly provided Ubuntu packages 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 3.0.0, 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!