Installing Passenger Rails stack on Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon)

Just a few days ago Passenger was released in order to better integrate Rails with Apache. I decided to give it a try as I see it being very useful to simplify Rails deployments. I was also interested in testing the performance compared to nginx and mongrel.

Installation

• gem install passenger -y
• /var/lib/gems/1.8/bin/passenger-install-apache2-module
• apt-get install build-essential
• apt-get install apache2-mpm-prefork
• apt-get install apache2-prefork-dev
• apt-get install libapr1-dev
• /var/lib/gems/1.8/bin/passenger-install-apache2-module

Configuration

• edit /etc/apache2/conf.d/passenger to add required configuration

   LoadModule passenger_module /var/lib/gems/1.8/gems/passenger-1.0.1/ext/apache2/mod_passenger.so
   RailsSpawnServer /var/lib/gems/1.8/gems/passenger-1.0.1/bin/passenger-spawn-server
   RailsRuby /usr/bin/ruby1.8
  

• This is the virtual host config I used:

   <VirtualHost *>
     ServerName server.com
     DocumentRoot /railsapp/current/public
   </VirtualHost>