Passenger 2.2.4 packages for Ubuntu 29 Jun 09

Passenger 2.2.4 was released last week and we now have Ubuntu Hardy packages available in our repository.

Passenger 2.2.4 actually is just a small bug fix release for a memory leak in 2.2.3, but obviously brings all the benefits of 2.2.3 too.  A huge number of bugs have been fixed, particularly the “Broken Pipe” errors some sites under heavy loads were experiencing.

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.

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 2.0.5 packages for Ubuntu 5 Dec 08

Following the recent 2.0.4 release of the Passenger Rails module for Apache, version 2.0.5 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.

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.

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…

Happy Birthday Ubuntu! 20 Oct 08

Today is Ubuntu’s 4th birthday.  Ubuntu is the GNU/Linux distro that makes our Brightboxes rock.

Happy birthday Ubuntu!