Passenger 2.2.2 packages for Ubuntu 1 May 09

Passenger 2.2.2 was released a few days ago and we now have a package available for Ubuntu Hardy.  After a lot of testing, we’re also happy with the recent packaging changes so this is going straight to our stable repository.

This new version of Passenger brings a train-load of NGINX fixes, so our Passenger enabled nginx-brightbox package has been updated too and is available in our testing repository.  More details on using our testing repository here in the 2.2.1 announcement blog post.

Phusion Passenger 2.1.2 packages for Ubuntu 14 Mar 09

Following Friday’s release of Passenger 2.1.2 by the Phusion folks, we’ve updated our Ubuntu packages.  We’ve been testing version 2.1.1 packages for a little while now and they’ve been very stable, supporting both Rails 2.3 and older apps that still depend on Rack 0.4 (such as older Sinatra apps).

The details are on the usual page on our wiki.  If you have any problems or need any help, try our forums.

The new packages depend on new versions of the Ruby rack libraries (not the gem), but this is provided in our repository too and will be automatically installed. You need to install the fastthread gem yourself though.  Our repository provides a few other useful Hardy packages too.

We are only testing our packages against Ubuntu Hardy right now, but they should install and run fine on newer versions of Ubuntu too.

Remember, for maximum memory savings (and speed improvements) try our Ruby Enterprise Edition packages for Ubuntu Hardy (currently only 32bit packages available).

Passenger Ubuntu package updated 11 Jan 09

We’ve just built new versions of our Passenger Ubuntu package.  It’s still Passenger 2.0.6, but we tweaked the dependencies so you aren’t forced to use the Apache worker mpm (prefork should work just fine with Passenger).

We’re now also providing 64bit versions of the packages (the source of the 404 errors some of you reported when trying to install the package).

Documentation for the packages in the usual place on the wiki.

More Passenger news coming soon :)

Ubuntu Ruby with COW power! 6 Jan 09

We’ve built some experimental Ruby “Enterprise Edition” packages for Ubuntu Hardy.  Ruby EE is from the guys at Phusion and is copy-on-write friendly so, in combination with Phusion Passenger, saves memory.

Our packages just upgrade (i.e replace) the standard 1.8 Ruby installation, which might not be acceptable for everyone.  But it’s simpler than fiddling about with dual Ruby installations.

So, once you’ve added our experimental repository, you’re one command away from getting copy-on-write friendly Ruby EE.  If you don’t like it for some reason, one command gets up back to where you started.

These packages are currently experimental - we’re using them on a few small projects with good results so far, but they’ve not been heavily tested yet.

More details here on our wiki.

Sphinx Ubuntu Package 14 Dec 08

Sphinx is an SQL full-text search engine that’s being used more and more in the Rails world.  We’ve built some packages to provide Sphinx 0.9.8.1 on Ubuntu Hardy.  It comes with some basic man pages and the included documentation and examples, but it’s obviously more useful when used with a Rails plugin, such as Thinking Sphinx or Ultrasphinx.

So, rather than downloading the sources and compiling yourself, just install from our APT repository.  If you’re on a Brightbox it’s just:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install sphinx-search


Otherwise you’ll need to configure our repository manually.

We’re of course hoping to get these package accepted upstream at Debian/Ubuntu, so using Sphinx will be easy for everyone.

Happy indexing!

Passenger 2.0.4 packages for Ubuntu 2 Dec 08

Version 2.0.4 of the Passenger Rails module for Apache was released today by the Phusion team.  We’ve just released new Ubuntu Hardy packages for it.  If you’re already using the package from our repository, just apt-get update and upgrade.

As before, documentation for our packages is available on our Passenger wiki page.

Passenger package for Ubuntu Hardy updated 28 Nov 08

I’d just like to announce the new version (2.0.3-1bbox4) of our Phusion Passenger/mod_rails package for Ubuntu Hardy (first announced back in May).

The previous version was faulty and resulted in mod_passenger.so being installed in the root dir (doh!) - I’m not sure when that bug crept in.

I’ve also updated the dependencies slightly - it will no longer require the rubygems package.  This helps those of you who have installed gems manually and would rather not use the Ubuntu packages.  If you didn’t install gems manually, you’ll need to explicitly specify the package now.

This, and a little more information can be found on our Passenger wiki page.

If you need help using these packages, or would like to feed back your experiences, go on over to the discussion forum.

Accepted into Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex

And if you weren’t aware, our package was accepted into the official Ubuntu repository (in the universe component) so if you’re using Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex, you can use it straight away! (though it does require the packages rubygems).  Another step towards Ubuntu being the perfect rails stack. The source package page can be found here.

Next up, Ruby Enterprise Edition packages…

Now with Ubuntu 8.04 LTS Hardy powers 2 Oct 08

We’ve now switched to Ubuntu Hardy (8.04 LTS) as our default Brightbox image.

We’ve been using Hardy for months now to power our managed products and clusters and it’s proved very stable.  Some of the highlights:

• Ruby 1.8.6 as standard
• Apache 2.2.8 as standard
• Imagemagick 6.3 as standard (roll on the new rmagick gems!)
• Git 1.5.4 as standard
• Better virtualisation support - we can now live upgrade ram on Brightboxes without a reboot

It still comes pre-configured for Rails deployment and we’re still providing improved and extra packages where necessary (such as nginx 6.31).

We’re also still supporting our Ubuntu Dapper machines and can still pre-install Dapper for customers who are already using it on their other boxes.

Upgrading

Due to the way Brightboxes are built, you can’t easily upgrade your Dapper box to Hardy.  Currently, the only supported way to upgrade is to file a support ticket with us and we’ll rebuild your Brightbox as Hardy.  This will require downtime and redeployment of your app (a good time to move to the new Brightbox deployment gem if you haven’t already)

Ruby Security Vulnerabilities 25 Jun 08

Some of you will have noticed the kerfuffle regarding the recent Ruby security vulnerabilities.  Fixed version of Ruby were released over the weekend but they are causing crashes in applications.  Until working fixes are available we’re all a bit stuck.

Details of the bugs have been kept officially secret but people are figuring it out for themselves (thanks to Zed in particular).  This secrecy has just contributed to the fear, uncertainty and doubt surrounding the issues and hasn’t helped the situation at all.

We currently recommend sitting tight until proper fixes are available.  When this happens, distros will release new packages in the usual manner.  Brightboxes are based on the Ubuntu distro and their security team are aware of the problem and are working on it (see the bug status here).

For those of you using the standard Ruby from Dapper (most of you) you should be able to just upgrade  using aptitude as soon as Ubuntu release new packages.  For those of you using the backported Ruby 1.8.6 packages, you’ll need to wait for us to backport the fixes once they’re released.  We’ll obviously be doing this asap.

We’ll update the blog as we know more.

UPDATE: Ubuntu have fixed ruby1.8 packages available now. They have already appeared in the Ubuntu security repository and are available for install.  Preliminary testing of the Dapper packages has been successful (gems with native libraries too).  We’re re-backporting the Hardy 1.8.6 packages right now and they’ll be available soon.

UPDATE: We have the fixed Hardy packages (1.8.6-p111) backported to Dapper available on the Brightbox testing apt repository.  They’ve passed a lot of preliminary tests but have not been tested extensively in production yet.  Please report any problems  with them (segfaults etc.) to support@brightbox.co.uk.

Brightbox builds Hardy Passenger package 21 May 08

We’ve created an Ubuntu Hardy package for Passenger - the apache ‘mod_rails’ hosting solution written by the team at Phusion, and sent the resulting patches back upstream to improve Passenger for everybody.

The package is available from the Brightbox repository at http://apt.brightbox.net and is called ‘libapache2-mod-passenger’.

Brightboxes have the repository in place by default, but you can easily add the repository to your system with the following commands:

sudo sh -c 'echo "deb http://apt.brightbox.net hardy main" > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/brightbox.list'
sudo sh -c 'wget -q -O - http://apt.brightbox.net/release.asc | apt-key add -'
sudo apt-get update

There will be a beta Passenger Brightbox machine available soon and we’re probably going to need some volunteers to trial it out. So if you like your Rails Hosting bleeding edge then let me know and I’ll put you on the list.

If you do use the .deb, be warned that I’m changing it all the time at the moment as Passenger evolves and I’m following Passenger trunk very closely.