For further information on using these packages see the release announcement for our Ruby EE 2010.01 packages.

As with our other Ruby EE packages, they upgrade (i.e replace) the standard 1.8 Ruby installation. This means all your gems stay the same, and everything on your system immediately starts using them (Phusion’s own Ubuntu packages do not work like this).

These packages are also the best way to get Ruby 1.8.7 on Hardy, which you’ll need if you’re playing with Rails 3.

If you’re on a Hardy based Brightbox, just create or edit /etc/apt/sources.list.d/brightbox-rubyee.list to contain the rubyee-testing component like so:

deb http://apt.brightbox.net/ hardy rubyee-testing

If you’re on one of our Lucid beta boxes provisioned before today, simply create /etc/apt/sources.list.d/brightbox-rubyee.list and add the rubyee component:

deb http://apt.brightbox.net/ lucid rubyee

Finally, update and upgrade libruby1.8:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install libruby1.8 irb1.8 libopenssl-ruby1.8 libreadline-ruby1.8 rdoc1.8 ruby1.8

If you’re not on a Brightbox, see the instructions on our wiki first. The wiki also documents how to revert back to the old packages.

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.

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.

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install libapache2-mod-xsendfile
sudo a2enmod xsendfile
sudo invoke-rc.d apache reload

As with our other Ruby EE packages, they upgrade (i.e replace) the standard 1.8 Ruby installation. This means all your gems stay the same, and everything on your system immediately starts using them (Phusion’s own Ubuntu packages do not work like this).  We’ve tested it with the usual Railsy native gems, RMagick, Mongrel, fasthread etc. and have had no problems.

If you’re on a Brightbox, just edit /etc/apt/sources.list.d/brightbox-rubyee.list and change the rubyee component to rubyee-testing:

deb http://apt.brightbox.net/ hardy rubyee-testing

Then update and upgrade:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install libruby1.8

If you’re not on a Brightbox, see the instructions on our wiki first. The wiki also documents how to revert back to the old packages.

As said above, we now have 64bit packages available too (which was recently made easier by some Debian package dependency updates, also included in our repository).

Please let us know how they worked out for you on our forum. Thanks!

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.

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).

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 :)

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.

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!

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

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…

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)

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.

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.