Phusion Passenger and Dreamhost

By Ninh Bui May 20th, 2008

Hi guys (and girls),

If you’re reading this, you’ve probably gotten the lowdown on Phusion Passenger being used by Dreamhost. Needless to say, we’re thrilled about the number of people now being able to painlessly deploy their applications using Phusion Passenger. However, we’d like to take this opportunity to clear a few things up.

Firstly, we’ve received a lot of questions of you guys on if Dreamhost is sponsoring the development of Passenger or have financially compensated us for the support that we’ve provided. The answer to this question is no, instead, they’ve done something that we believe was just as important for us as developers: test our product in a large, live shared hosting environment. Fortunately, you guys seem to have been more than favorable in testing Phusion Passenger and through your feedback, allowed us to streamline our solution to deployment even more. Thank you for this!

Secondly, we’d like to reiterate that the support forums of Phusion Passenger are SOLELY for Phusion Passenger. We’ve received a fair amount of questions that were related to Dreamhost as well, and we’d like to kindly redirect those people to Dreamhost’s support department.

By now, you should have probably already inferred that commercial support isn’t something that is going to ensure Phusion Passenger’s future development alone as it seems little to no support is required for a product that is pretty much self explanatory and which already enjoys excellent community support: hmmm, maybe we should remove the forums and installer in a future version ;-)

All kidding aside though, what is going to ensure Phusion Passenger’s future development is the people who develop and use it, both of which you guys can help out with by donating time and effort. From this, it should become apparent that we’re grateful for any kind of donation you can come up with in supporting Phusion Passenger. This includes feedback, patches and of course, monetary donations (but only do this if you think the product is worth it).

The latter perhaps requires a little bit more elaboration. A common misconception seems to be that open source is entirely “free of charge”, but we think this only holds true for someone if he or she decides it should be so. Open source is being paid for in terms of time and effort, and from our side, as a company, that translates to allocating human resources for development and support. Needless to say, this also translates to finances and we’ve done a fair amount of this in the past and will continue to do so in the future, but are also dependent of your efforts in this as well!

Thanks for the love people!

Cheers,
Hongli Lai
Ninh Bui

General | Comments (6)

Ruby Enterprise Edition website “launched”

By Hongli Lai May 14th, 2008

Well hello there.

Since you guys must probably be bored out of your ***** waiting for Ruby Enterprise Edition to be released, let’s play a little play to let the time pass by quicker mmm’kay? ;)

A riddle actually, see http://www.RubyEnterpriseEdition.com for more information ;)

Be sure to scroll down, the next hint will be revealed on May 20th, 2008.

We’re looking forward to reading your submissions :D

Cheers,
Hongli Lai
Ninh Bui

Phusion Passenger, Ruby Enterprise Edition, Ruby on Rails | Comments (5)

“Rails escapes the Ghetto”

By Ninh Bui May 13th, 2008

Dreamhost is now officially on Phusion Passenger :D or as some people have put it, “Rails escapes the Ghetto”.

Please help us with modding/digging these up. :)

General | Comments (2)

Building native Linux packages for Passenger is now possible

By Hongli Lai May 13th, 2008

Some people say that they won’t install Passenger until native Linux packages are available.

Well, we’ve made some modifications to Passenger to make packagers’ lives a bit easier:

  • There’s now a Rake task called fakeroot. This generates a directory hierarchy in pkg/fakeroot, which can be directly turned into a native package.
  • There’s also a package:debian task which generates a Debian package. But this Debian package is very generic. For example, it doesn’t specify any dependencies at all, because:
    • Passenger requires fastthread, and Debian doesn’t provide a native package for that.
    • Lots of people have Ruby and/or Apache installed from source.

Despite that, our Debian package specification files can be used as a base for packagers who wish to create more distribution-specific packages.

We’re looking for volunteers who wish to maintain packages for their distribution. Packagers should:

  • package early, package often. Native packages should follow as soon as possible after a Passenger release. Or – preferably – be released at the same time.
  • test early, test often. Packagers should test our development version from time to time to verify that generated packages still work.
  • drink beer with us. ;)

Needless to say, the more Linux packages we can put on our website, the better. Please contact us if you’d like to volunteer. Thanks. :)

Linux, Phusion Passenger | Comments (4)

Super premium limited Phusion t-shirts!!!

By Ninh Bui May 8th, 2008

Silkscreen printed on 210 grams super premium shirts… only 60 of 100 left people! More info about acquiring one of these bad boys will follow soon ;-)

General | Comments (4)

Passenger (mod_rails) 1.0.5 released

By Hongli Lai May 7th, 2008

Passenger version 1.0.5 has just been released. Because of time constraints we haven’t had time to write announcements for 1.0.3 and 1.0.4, so here’s a summary of changes in 1.0.3, 1.0.4 and 1.0.5:

Fixed MacOS X support, this time for real

1.0.2 fixed compatibility for MacOS X. Unfortunately, the fix broke 64-bit Linux. 1.0.4 fixed support for 64-bit Linux, but that fix broke MacOS X again.

1.0.5 fixes support for MacOS X *and* 64-bit Linux. It hadn’t been easy to get this right, and we kindly thank all the testers who have helped us with this. :)

Note to C/C++ developers: if you’re looking for cross-platform file descriptor passing code, please feel free to copy & paste it from Passenger’s source code. Every single code example about file descriptor passing that we could find on the Internet, has portability problems (= works on 64-bit Linux but not 64-bit OS X, or vice versa). We believe that we’ve solved all those portability issues.

Fixed support for Ruby on Rails 1.2
Version 1.0.2 broke support for Ruby on Rails 1.2, because it used a feature that only 2.0 and up has. Version 1.0.3 fixed this problem.

How do I upgrade?

Just install it like you did the first time:

gem install passenger

and

passenger-install-apache2-module

Please don’t forget to copy & paste the Apache config snippet that the installer gives you.

At the time of writing, RubyForge is still busy updating all their gem mirror servers. So if gem install passenger didn’t work for you, then please download it from HTTP at: http://rubyforge.org/frs/?group_id=5873

Phusion Passenger, Ruby on Rails | Comments (5)

Phusion/Passenger interview by AkitaOnRails

By Hongli Lai May 7th, 2008

AkitaOnRails had recently interviewed us. The interview covers our company’s background and information about Passenger, among other things. He asked us quite some interesting questions, so we recommend you to read the interview. :)

General | Comments (0)