Phusion Passenger / mod_rails

We've created Passenger packages for Ubuntu Hardy and Lucid - the Apache 'mod_rails' hosting solution written by the team at Phusion.

The package is available from the Brightbox apt 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 (if you're using Hardy, substitute 'lucid' for 'hardy'):

sudo sh -c 'echo "deb http://apt.brightbox.net lucid 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

You can also use our Launchpad PPA. It's focused just on Passenger, so doesn't have our other packages, but you might prefer that. It also has support for Ubuntu Maverick and Ubuntu Natty.

sudo apt-add-repository ppa:brightbox/passenger
sudo apt-get update

To install:

sudo apt-get install libapache2-mod-passenger

We have a separate repository for the nginx packages. See this blog post for more details.

To take full advantage of Passenger, you should consider installing our Ruby Enterprise Edition packages.

Whilst Passenger works perfectly with the Apache prefork mpm, we recommend using the event mpm. The event mpm is incompatible with mod_php, but you can very easily run PHP in FastCGI mode alongside Passenger. See our PHP docs for more information.

You can get help with this package and/or feed back about your experiences on the Brightbox Passenger forum.