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.

I’m already sold on Passenger and talked it up a bit at RailsConf. Still the list of features coming for version 2 are impressive and should win over some holdouts still using mongrel+nginx and similar setups. Passenger 2.0 will have Rack support, reduced memory usage, fair load balancing, upload buffering, as well as performance and stability improvements. Release Candidate 1 is available now for testing and I may test though I may just wait for 2.0 to be released and upgrade my systems then. More information can be found in the Passenger RC1 Annoucement.

I did a search for recipes to handle starting/restarting Passenger rails applications. I cam across this dzone snippet that I felt had the right approach. It creates a mod_rails:restart task and then overrides the deploy:start and deploy:restart tasks with a call to that task. This not only accomplishes restarting properly but also removes the default deploy:restart task which is not applicable.

A changelog for the recent versions of Passenger (1.0.3-1.0.5) was recently posted. I decided to do a quick upgrade to 1.0.5 following the steps I’ve used previously. Those steps are documented as follows.

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.

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.