Passenger 5.1.7: Enterprise usage reporting improvements

by Camden Narzt

Version 5.1.7 of the Passenger application server for Ruby, Node.js, Meteor and Python has been released. It features improved reliability and improved system CA path detection for enterprise usage data recording. As well as improved compilation robustness and various improvements to the included json library.

The 5.1.x series of Passenger brings a plethora of improvements in uptime maximization, security and efficiency. Please be aware that you can enjoy enterprise features and sponsor the open source development directly by buying Phusion Passenger Enterprise.

Improves reliability of usage data recording (Enterprise)

Fixes a potential use-after-free bug when reporting usage data to the Phusion licensing server, and reduces the time spent with open file handles to improve robustness against data-corruption.

System CA path robustness improved (Enterprise)

Fixes an SSL certificate issue in the license usage data reporter, which only occurs when Passenger Enterprise is installed from a gem or tarball. The license usage data reporter now searches for the correct system CA path, rather than rely on a single path.

Various fixes

  • Fixes compilation problems on some systems.
  • Upgrades the JSON parser (json-cpp) to version 1.8.1. This makes parsing slightly faster, adds various security checks and fixes some JSON generation issues.

Installing 5.1.7

Please see the installation guide.

Upgrading to 5.1.7

We strongly advise staying up to date with the latest version.

See also the upgrade notes below!


OS X
Debian
Ubuntu
Heroku

Red Hat
CentOS
Ruby gem
Tarball

Docker

If you are upgrading from 4.x, please read the 5.0 upgrade notes to learn about potential upgrade caveats.

Download issue with old gem version

Old versions of gem (below 2.2.0, released in 2013) may fail to download the Passenger Enterprise gem from our rubygem hosting software (Gem in a box).

ERROR: Could not find a valid gem 'passenger-enterprise-server' (= 5.1.4), here is why:
 Unable to download data from https://..@www.phusionpassenger.com/enterprise_gems/
 - bad response Unauthorized 401

If this happens, please upgrade to a newer version of gem:

gem install rubygems-update; update_rubygems

Special notes about capistrano-passenger

If you are using Capistrano and capistrano-passenger, then it may fail with this error:

SSHKit::Runner::ExecuteError: Exception while executing as user@99.99.99.99: undefined method `[]' for nil:NilClass

NoMethodError: undefined method `[]' for nil:NilClass

Tasks: TOP => passenger:restart

This is due to an incompatibility in capistrano-passenger with Passenger 5.0.22 and later. Please upgrade capistrano-passenger to 0.2.0 or later.