Phusion Passenger™ (a.k.a. mod_rails / mod_rack)

Easiest way to install Phusion Passenger

1. Open a terminal, and type:

   gem install passenger

2. Type:

   passenger-install-apache2-module

   Or, if you want to install the Nginx version instead:

   passenger-install-nginx-module

   And follow the instructions.

   Or, for the standalone version, type:

   cd /path/to/your/webapp
   passenger start

If you encounter any problems, please read the Users guide (Apache)/Users guide (Nginx)/Users guide (Standalone) for troubleshooting tips and/or try the tarball below.

Other installation methods & downloads

Native Ubuntu Linux package

John Leach from Brightbox has kindly provided Ubuntu packages for Phusion Passenger. The package is available from the Brightbox repository which you can find at http://apt.brightbox.net.

Add the following line to the Third Party Software Sources:

deb http://apt.brightbox.net hardy main

(The simplest way to do that is to create a file in /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ containing the deb instruction, and then run 'apt-get update').

Once you've done this then you can install Phusion Passenger by running:

apt-get install libapache2-mod-passenger

or, for the Nginx version:

apt-get install nginx-brightbox

Please also visit the package's wiki page for more documentation about this package.

Native Red Hat/Fedora/CentOS RPM packages

YUM repositories with RPMs are maintained by Erik Ogan and Stealthy Monkeys Consulting.

Step 1: install the release package

The easiest way to install Phusion Passenger and keep it up to date is to install the passenger-release package from the main repository:

Fedora Core 15:

yum install http://passenger.stealthymonkeys.com/fedora/15/passenger-release.noarch.rpm

Fedora Core 14:

yum install http://passenger.stealthymonkeys.com/fedora/14/passenger-release.noarch.rpm

RHEL 5 / CentOS 5 / ScientificLinux 5: (Note: these packages depend on EPEL.)

rpm -Uvh http://passenger.stealthymonkeys.com/rhel/5/passenger-release.noarch.rpm

RHEL 6 / CentOS 6 / ScientificLinux 6:

yum install http://passenger.stealthymonkeys.com/rhel/6/passenger-release.noarch.rpm

Step 2: use Yum

From there you can use Yum to install packages. For example, try one of these:

yum install nginx-passenger

or

yum install mod_passenger

or

yum install passenger-standalone

Building your own packages

There are instructions for building your own packages and Yum repositories in the rpm directory ReadMe within the GitHub repository.

Download source code

To install Passenger from source code, extract the source tarball:

tar xzvf passenger-X.X.X.tar.gz

Then run the included installer:

./passenger-X.X.X/bin/passenger-install-apache2-module

or, for the Nginx version:

./passenger-X.X.X/bin/passenger-install-nginx-module

Older versions

Older versions of Passenger can be obtained from the RubyForge project page.

Ruby Enterprise Edition

You can transparently reduce memory usage of your Rails applications by about 33%, by using Ruby Enterprise Edition.

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