We’ve just released a new version of the Brightbox deployment gem. The gem has supported bundler for a long time, but now calls to rake tasks use bundler too (if the app is bundler enabled of course). This solves the problem some people were having where the right gems weren’t available during rake execution, or rake itself complained about a rake version mismatch.
Phusion Passenger 3.0.0 was released back in October. It’s up to 55% faster and sports new stability features, which should keep your site up even if a faulty app instance causes problems (such as “out of memory” errors).
We’ve now got Ubuntu Hardy and Lucid packages available on our apt repository and we consider it ready for production use. Brightbox customers can upgrade from Passengr 2.x simply by running these commands on their Brightboxes:
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install -qy libapache2-mod-passengerIf you’ve not got a Brightbox, you’ll need to add our apt repository key and config first. You can read more about it on our wiki.
The team at Phusion have been hard at work on Passenger 3 and last week released a beta version for testing. Continuing our work with Passenger 2, we’ve been working hard on packaging it.
We now have Passenger 3.0.0-pre3 packages available for Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid) and Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy). As they’re pre-release versions, we don’t recommend them in production just yet and have put them in their own repository to prevent any accidental upgrades.
If you’re not already a Brightbox customer, then you’ll need to set up base access to our apt repository first.
Otherwise, just add the new passenger-testing repository (switch “lucid” to “hardy” if you’re on Hardy):
sudo sh -c 'echo "deb http://apt.brightbox.net lucid passenger-testing" > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/brightbox-passenger-testing.list'
Then you can upgrade/install 3.0.0-1bbox1~pre3
apt-get update
apt-get install libapache2-mod-passenger
Passenger now has a native library, which depends on your version of ruby. For simplicity, these packages currently require the ruby1.8 packages to be installed. You can, of course, switch to ruby1.9 and passenger will auto-compile the necessary native support for you. We’ll be providing packages for 1.9 support soon, so you won’t need to rely on the auto-compiling.
Getting access to your newly purchased Brightboxes used to require a trip to the control panel to retrieve the ‘rails’ user password. If you’re using config management systems like Chef or Puppet this is likely the only laborious aspects of configuring your box. No longer!
Now, whenever a new box is deployed, the SSH keys of all the technical contacts on your Brightbox account are automatically pre-installed for the default ‘rails’ user. To add your own SSH key, edit your user profile within the control panel and paste in your SSH public key using the editor at the bottom.
Remember, this only affects newly provisioned boxes – as the it’s done during the box build stage. Removing or adding technical contacts in the control panel at a later date will not automatically change any access control on existing boxes.
The last Passenger release, 2.2.10, has a bug that causes Apache to freeze when used under moderate load (Phusion say high load but we’ve seen it on quite moderate conditions). We recommend that anyone using Passenger 2.2.10 upgrade to 2.2.11 asap. Ubuntu Hardy packages are now available in our repository.
Phusion released Passenger 2.2.10 this week, fixing some bundler compatibility bugs and a file descriptor bug that could lead to “mysterious crashes”.
We’ve built our Ubuntu Hardy packages for i386 and AMD64 architectures which are now available from the Brightbox apt repository. We’ve also upgraded our librack-ruby packages to 1.1.0.
Today I’m pleased to announce a new revision of the Brightbox Deployment Gem, version 2.3.6. This release fixes some of the issues reported to us by our users, along with a few extra features.
The documentation on the wiki has been updated with the new fixes and features. If you have any tips or find any errors just let us know.
NEW FEATURES
Just as you can currently define gems your application relies on and have them automatically installed onto your servers, you can now do the same with apt packages. Define them in your deploy.rb and they’ll be installed before installing your required rubygems, which means you can use it to install apt packages that gems depend on. As an example, the nokogiri gem depends on a couple of apt packages.
depend :remote, :apt, "libxml2-dev"
depend :remote, :apt, "libxslt1-dev"
depend :remote, :gem, "nokogiri", ">= 0"
Support for Intermediate SSL Certificates in Apache has been added, meaning you no longer need to manually edit the Apache config files directly. Just add one line to your deploy.rb and the gem now takes care of updating the Apache config for you. An example SSL configuration:
set :ssl_certificate, "my_cert.pem"
set :ssl_key, "my_cert.key"
set :ssl_intermediate, "intermediate.crt"
See the wiki page for Adding SSL Support to Apache for more information.
A common issue we’ve seen with is setting the deploy password. If you put it in deploy.rb, then it inevitably ends up in your source control repository, which is a bad idea. A workaround we’ve suggested in the past is to have a deploy.local.rb file, which isn’t tracked by source control, and load that from within your deploy.rb file. This allows you to have the password (or any other sensitive settings) defined, but kept outside your source control.
As part of this release, the gem now has official support for a deploy.local.rb file. If it exists, the gem will load it in for you.
For more information see the Advanced Gem Settings page on the wiki.
If you’ve made manual changes to your webserver (apache or nginx) configuration, then you don’t want an accidental deploy:setup to overwrite your configs. Up until now you just had to avoid running the command, but now there’s a setting to disable it for you.
set :generate_webserver_config, false
FIXES AND ENHANCEMENTS
The Phusion team released Passenger 2.2.9 today, which adds support for Rails 3, the GEM bundler, and fixes a couple of bugs. As usual Brightbox are providing Ubuntu Hardy packages for i386 and AMD64 architectures, available now from the Brightbox apt repository.
This package won’t actually support Rails 3 just yet though as we’ve yet to package and test the librack 1.1.0, which Rails 3 depends on. We’re working on it now and once we’re happy with it we’ll add new packages to our repository as usual.
Passenger 2.2.6 (quickly followed by 2.2.7) was released last week and we now have i386 and AMD64 Ubuntu Hardy packages available in our repository.
As usual, details on installing the packages from our repository are available on our wiki.
If you’re using Passenger and it’s making you happy, please do consider supporting its development by donating money in the form of an “Enterprise License” direct from Phusion, the company behind it.
The Phusion team released a new version of Passenger last week, 2.2.1, which sports a shiny new NGINX extension. It also adds chunked file uploads (Apache only) and improves restarts.
We’ve had to restructure the way our Ubuntu packages are built to enable installation of the NGINX extension, so needs more extensive testing than usual. The packages are now available for Ubuntu Hardy in our testing repository.
You’ll need to add our testing repository to your apt sources list. And if you’re not on a Brightbox, you’ll need to import our key and add our stable repository too.
Once you’ve done that, you can install the new version of Passenger. If you’re wanting to just install the Apache version:
sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install libapache2-mod-passenger
This will pull in a new dependency, passenger-common.
If you just want to get stuck in with the new NGINX support, install the nginx-brightbox package:
sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install nginx-brightbox
This will also pull in the passenger-common dependency. This is NGINX 0.6.36 plus some useful modules: upload progress, upstream fair, geoip, ey-balancer and access key. It will replace any other NGINX packages you have installed (NGINX does not support dynamic modules like Apache).
You can install both Apache and NGINX side by side, but you’ll obviously need to run them on different ports.
The 2.2.1 Apache package has already had quite a bit of testing by us, but the NGINX package has had very little. We’ve already come across a Passenger bug with reloading NGINX (reported here), though we expect this will be fixed quickly. So basically, these are good to play with but not for production just yet.
If you need any help with these packages, try our Passenger support forum.