Howto upgrade Passenger to 2.0.1

I noticed that Passenger 2.0.1 became available today and I decided to upgrade a couple of my Rails sites which are using it. The process was painless but there are some configuration changes to note when upgrading from 1.0.x. So here are the steps I took.

Update: I’d also like to confirm that fair load balancing is working properly with Passenger. This is a feature that I have wanted for some time and I’m glad to see it working.

• /etc/init.d/apache2 stop
  • I find that stopping Apache is the best way to ensure plenty of memory on a VPS.
• gem update
  • For those with Passenger installed this should update the gem to 2.0.1.
• passenger-install-apache2-module
  • This command will build the apache2 module for the new version.
• Update essential Passenger configuration
  • The LoadModule directives stays relatively unchanged except for the version number:
    1.0.5: LoadModule passenger_module /var/lib/gems/1.8/gems/passenger-1.0.5/ext/apache2/mod_passenger.so
    2.0.1: LoadModule passenger_module /var/lib/gems/1.8/gems/passenger-2.0.1/ext/apache2/mod_passenger.so
  • RailsSpawnServer has been obsoleted by PassengerRoot
    1.0.5: RailsSpawnServer /var/lib/gems/1.8/gems/passenger-2.0.1/bin/passenger-spawn-server
    2.0.1: PassengerRoot /var/lib/gems/1.8/gems/passenger-2.0.1
  • RailsRuby has been replaced by PassengerRuby
    1.0.5: RailsRuby /usr/bin/ruby1.8
    2.0.1: PassengerRuby /usr/bin/ruby1.8
• Updating additional Passenter configuration
  • RailsUserSwitching and RailsDefaultUser have been replaced by PassengerUserSwitching and PassengerDefaultUser
  • RailsMaxPoolSize and RailsPoolIdleTime have been replaced by PassengerMaxPoolSize and PassengerPoolIdleTime.
• /etc/init.d/apache2 start
  • Restart Apache and all should be well.