Upgrading Passenger (mod_rails) to 1.0.4

I’ve been evaluating Passenger for a while now and I’ve generally been pleased. I find that an Apache + Passenger setup has been easier to manage than alternative Rails stacks. Performance has been good and memory consumption has been lessened which also helps performance on the systems in general. However I have seen some strange bugs while using my web apps under Passenger. I am hoping that this upgrade will resolve these issues. The upgrade was relatively easy and the steps I took follows.

There is no changelog for 1.0.4, but there is a changelog for Passenger 1.0.2. The changes there look important and hopefully futher changelogs will be forthcoming.

• gem update
  • Update gems which should pull in passenger 1.0.4 if passenger is installed.
• passenger-install-apache2-module
  • This will compile the passenger module. Unfortunately the first screen of information doesn’t report the version however it is reported after pressing enter and again at the end.
• edit apache2 configuration
  • I have to change the LoadModule passenger_module and RailsSpawnServer directives to reference the 1.0.4 directory instead of the 1.0.1 directory.
• /etc/init.d/apache2 restart
  • Apache must be restarted for the changes to take effect.

After this the Rails applications were running using Passenger 1.0.4. I could verify this with the command lsof | grep passenger. I’ve only been running for a day or two but so far I haven’t seen any of the errors I saw under 1.0.1. Here’s hoping it stays that way.