Phusion Passenger / mod_rails

We've created an Ubuntu Hardy package for Passenger - 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:

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

To install:

sudo apt-get install libapache2-mod-passenger

The package no longer requires the Ubuntu rubygems package, to help people who prefer to manually install gems rather than using the official Ubuntu packages. If you didn't install gems manually, you'll need to explicitly specify the package (Brightboxes come pre-installed with gems).

sudo apt-get install libapache2-mod-passenger rubygems

You also need the fastthread gem:

sudo gem install fastthread

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 worker mpm, which should be more memory efficient. The worker 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.