Brightbox Gem v.2.2 – now with Passenger support 12 Jan 09

Today I am pleased to announce a new release of our Brightbox Gem, version 2.2. This release brings us the long anticipated support for Phusion Passenger (a.k.a. mod_rails).

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

The Passenger™ Masterplan 7 Dec 08

As you’ve probably seen, we’ve been providing Ubuntu packages for Phusion Passenger for some time now (since May, in fact) and have managed to get them accepted into the official Ubuntu repositories already. The inevitable question that’s cropped up recently though (especially with the attention received by the Phusion guys in recent weeks) is “when will you be supporting Passenger?”. That’s something I’m going to address right now…

The quick answer is (stop press) within the next few weeks. Read on for the longer version :)

There are a couple of things we need to do before “officially” supporting Passenger on Brightbox…

1. We need to complete the packaging of Ruby Enterprise Edition for Ubuntu Hardy (which John is working on right now)
2. We need to update the Brightbox gem to support deployment and management with Passenger – as well as Apache/Mongrel and Nginx/Mongrel (which it will continue to do).

Neither of these are particulary mammoth tasks, but we do have a lot of internal projects going on at the same time such as improving the control panel (watch this space) as well as the day-to-day work of running a hosting company and managing clusters for some very large customers [plug].

Stay tuned over the next few weeks as we announce Passenger support together with a very special discount offer!

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