We’ve built Ubuntu packages for the latest release of Phusion Passenger, 3.0.11. They’re available now on our apt repository and our Launchpad ppa. Instructions on how to get set up are on our wiki as usual.
Updated NGINX Passenger packages will follow shortly (they’ll be available via a separate ppa)
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.
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.
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.
Phusion Passenger 2.1.3 has been released and we’ve updated our Ubuntu packages as usual. Instructions in the usual place on our wiki.
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).