Phusion Blog

We are excited to announce a set of new, revamped developer documentation for Phusion Passenger. While we’ve always had detailed user documentation, our developer documentation was quite sparse in comparison. We had a Contributors Guide that briefly shows you around, an Architectural Overview that mostly covers the I/O model and spawning system, and code comments. Despite this, it was hard for new developers to understand how things work.

Today, we’re changing this with the following:

• The Contributors Guide has been much improved. It provides a clear, concise starting point for contributors.
• The 8-minutes Developer Quickstart video shows you how you can get started with developing Passenger, through our Vagrant-based development environment. For those who don’t want to watch the video, there is also a Developer Quickstart document.
• The Design and Architecture document explains in detail what the design and architecture looks like. It supersedes the Architectural Overview.
• The Code Walkthrough video walks you through the Passenger codebase, showing you step-by-step how things fit together. It complements the Design and Architecture document.

We need your feedback

At its heart, Passenger is and remains open source, and that means it’s important that people can easily understand and modify the code. We hope that with this, it is now significantly easier to contribute to Passenger. But is it easy enough now? Is there anything we should change or add? We don’t know.

Read the documents. Watch the videos. Use the comment box below and let us know what you think. 🙂