Phusion Passenger / mod_rails

We maintain Ubuntu packages for Phusion Passenger - the Apache 'mod_rails' hosting solution written by the team at Phusion.

Our packages are now hosted on Launchpad. It's focused just on Passenger, so doesn't have our other packages.

You can add our repository very simply:

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

If you're on the older Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy release, the apt-add-repository command isn't available so you have to install the repository and the key by hand:

sudo sh -c 'echo "deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/brightbox/passenger/ubuntu hardy main" > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/brightbox-passenger.list'
sudo apt-key adv --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv-keys C3173AA6
sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install libapache2-mod-passenger

And reload apache and you're ready to go.

We have a separate repository for the nginx packages:

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

Then installed nginx:

sudo apt-get install nginx-full

You’ll then need to enable the Passenger module, which can be usually done like this:

cat <<EOF > /etc/nginx/conf.d/passenger.conf
passenger_root /usr/lib/phusion-passenger;
EOF

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.