Phusion Blog

Phusion Passenger is software that deploys Ruby and Python web apps, by integrating into Apache and Nginx and turning them into a fully-featured application server. It is very fast, stable and robust and thus used by the likes of New York Times, AirBnB, Symantec, Pixar, etc. It comes with many features that make your life easier and your application perform better.

Phusion Passenger is under constant maintenance and development. Version 4.0.7 is a bugfix releases. UPDATE: this announcement was originally about 4.0.6, but there was a regression in 4.0.6 that sometimes prevents PassengerLoggingAgent from starting up. Unfortunately this slipped our release testing. This regression has been fixed in 4.0.7 and we’ve updated our test suite to check for these kinds of regressions. Our apologies for the inconvenience!

Phusion Passenger also has an Enterprise version which comes with a wide array of additional features. By buying Phusion Passenger Enterprise you will directly sponsor the development of the open source version.

Recent changes

• Fixed a potential 100% CPU lock up in the crash handler, which only occurs
  on OS X. Fixes issue #908.
• Fixed a crash in request handling, when certain events are trigger after
  the client has already disconnected. Fixes issue #889.
• Phusion Passenger will no longer crash when the Phusion Passenger
  native_support Ruby extension cannot be compiled, e.g. because the Ruby
  development headers are not installed or because the current user has no
  permission to save the native extension file. Fixes issue #890.
• Fixed OS X 10.9 support. Fixes issue #906.
• Removed dependency on bash, so that Phusion Passenger works out of the box
  on BSD platforms without installing/configuring bash. Fixes issue #911.
• Fix ‘PassengerPoolIdleTime 0’ not being respected correctly. Issue #904.
• Admin tools improvement: it is now possible to see all currently running
  requests by invoking passenger-status --show=requests.
• A new feature called Flying Passenger allows you to decouple the life time
  of Phusion Passenger from the web server, so that both can be restarted
  indepedently from each other. Please refer to this article for an introduction.
• [Apache] Fixed compatibility with Apache pipe logging. Previously this
  would cause Phusion Passenger to lock up with 100% CPU during Apache
  restart.
• [Nginx] The Nginx configure script now checks whether ‘ruby’ is in $PATH.
  Previously, if ‘ruby’ is not in $PATH, then the compilation process fails
  with an obscure error.
• [Nginx] passenger-install-nginx-module now works properly even when Phusion
  Passenger is installed through the Debian packages. Before, the installer
  would tell you to install Phusion Passenger through the gem or tarball
  instead.
• [Enterprise] Added pretty printing helpers to the Live IRB Console.
• Fixed permissions on a subdirectory in the server instance directory. The
  server instance directory is a temporary directory that Phusion Passenger
  uses to store working files, and is deleted after Phusion Passenger exits.
  A subdirectory inside it is world-writable (but not world-readable) and is
  used for storing Unix domain sockets created by different apps, which may
  run as different users. These sockets had long random filenames to prevent
  them from being guessed. However because of a typo, this subdirectory was
  created with the setuid bit, when it should have sticky bit (to prevent
  existing files from being deleted or renamed by a user that doesn’t own the
  file). This has now been fixed.
• If the server instance directory already exists, it will now be removed
  first in order get correct directory permissions. If the directory still
  exists after removal, Phusion Passenger aborts to avoid writing to a
  directory with unexpected permissions. Fixes issue #910.
• The installer now checks whether the system has enough virtual memory, and
  prints a helpful warning if it doesn’t.
• Linux/AArch64 compatibility fixes. Patch contributed by Dirk Mueller.
• Improved documentation.

Installing 4.0.7

Quick install/upgrade

Phusion Passenger Enterprise users can download the Enterprise version of 4.0.7 from the Customer Area.

Open source users can install the open source version of 4.0.7 with the following commands:

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

You can also download the tarball at the Release Archive page. We strongly encourage you to cryptographically verify files after downloading them.

In-depth instructions

In-depth installation and upgrade instructions can be found in the Installation section of the documentation. The documentation covers:

• Detailed tarball installation instructions.
• Detailed upgrade instructions.
• Installation troubleshooting.
• Installation through APT and YUM.

You can view the documentation online here:

• Apache manual
• Nginx manual

Final

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