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.

We’ve made it super easy to deploy your application using Passenger instead of the mongrel configuration recommended previously and there is documentation on how to use this on your Brightbox over at our wiki. New deployments are ready to go on Passenger immediately provided you have Ubuntu Hardy 8.04 already installed on your Brightbox. If you’re still on Ubuntu Dapper 6.06 then you can upgrade by simply ordering a new box, moving your data over and then cancelling the old box.

There is no automated way to move existing mongrel installs over to Passenger, but there is a very simple procedure outlined on the wiki page which will have you up and running in a few minutes.

If you have any questions or spot any bugs in this latest release then please let us know, we now have a forum on which we will be happy to answer your Passenger and Brightbox gem questions.

Update 12/01/2009: After spotting a regression which snuck in just before we released version 2.2, version 2.2.1 has just been released and should be propogating around the Rubyforge mirrors right now.

Update 2 13/01/2009: I found a better way to handle passenger restarts. This has been added to the gem and the version has been bumped to 2.2.2

Particularly of note, this fixes a deadlock bug using Passenger and global queueing with the Apache worker mpm.

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…

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.