Phusion Passenger 5.0.11: bug fixes

Version 5.0.11 of the Phusion Passenger application server for Ruby, Python, Node.js and Meteor has been released.

If you hadn't already, be sure to check out the many major improvements that the 5.x series of Passenger introduces. And please be aware that you can enjoy enterprise features and sponsor the open source development directly by buying Phusion Passenger Enterprise.

More admin tools fixes

In version 5.0.10, we introduced the ability to run admin tools such as passenger-status and passenger-config restart-app without sudo. That was particularly useful in Capistrano deployment scripts. However, there were a few bugs in the initial implementation.

One prominent bug was that if Passenger isn't currently running any apps, those tools would abort with an "authorization denied" error.

On Red Hat systems, the instance registry directory -- the directory in which files are stored that allow admin tools to communicate with the Passenger processes -- didn't have proper permissions to allow those tools to run without sudo.

On OS X, the instance registry directory varies between the shell and inside Apache/Nginx due to the way OS X sets the TMPDIR environment variable. Because of this, the admin tools didn't work out of the box on OS X. (GH-1535)

All these bugs have been fixed.

Miscellaneous bug fixes

Fixes a bug that causes Passenger not to work if the HOME environment variable is not set.
Fixes compatibility with non-Rails Ruby apps that require the actionview gem. Closes GH-1547.
Fixes some non-fatal "permission denied" error that may occasionally occur if user switching is turned off. Closes GH-1541.
If Passengerfile.json contains a syntax error, Passenger Standalone now correctly prints an error message instead of crashing.
Sending a SIGABRT signal to a Ruby process now properly makes it terminate.
[Apache] Setting PassengerLogLevel no longer redirects Apache's own stderr to that log file. Closes GH-1373.

Miscellaneous improvements

Relative values for the pid_file and log_file options in Passengerfile.json are now supported.
The passenger-config restart-app command now accepts . as parameter, which it will interpreter as "restart the app in the current working directory". Closes GH-1386.
[Standalone] Passenger Standalone's Nginx engine now includes the RealIP module. Closes GH-1389.
[Standalone] The --max-preloader-idle-time option has been added.