Passenger 5.3.5: fixing Ubuntu 18.04 regression

by Hongli Lai

Version 5.3.5 of the Passenger application server for Ruby, Node.js, Meteor and Python has been released. This release fixes an issue where Ubuntu 18.04 packages failed to install.

Rebuild against the latest Nginx

Two weeks ago we became aware of issues with Ubuntu 18.04 package installation, triggered by a Nginx version mismatch. As it turns out, Passenger's libnginx-mod-http-passenger package for Ubuntu strictly depends on the Nginx version current with our previous (5.3.4) release, 1.14.0-0ubuntu1. Two weeks ago an update in Ubuntu bumped the Nginx version to 1.14.0-0ubuntu1.1, preventing libnginx-mod-http-passenger from being installed.

We've rebuild our packages against the most current Nginx version for Ubuntu 18.04, which fixed the regression.

Various improvements & fixes

  • Improves usability of crash reports. Crash reports are no longer dumped in one big chunk to stderr. Instead, they are now dumped into multiple files, making it easy to inspect relevant reports.
  • Fixes some crashes that only occur with log level 7.
  • Downloads binaries from the newly-introduced Github mirror, improving the reliability of binary downloads.
  • Updated various library versions used in precompiled binaries (used for e.g. gem installs):
    • OpenSSL: 1.0.2p (was: 1.0.2o)
    • libcurl: 7.61.1 (was: 7.60.0)

Installing 5.3.5

Besides support for the latest software (Nginx stable, Ubuntu), the 5.3 series of Passenger features per-application logfiles. There has been a lot of work on the internals to enable vastly improved error reporting.

The 5.x series of Passenger in general brings a plethora of improvements in uptime maximization, security and efficiency. Please see the installation guide.

Upgrading to 5.3.5

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

Check out our upgrade guides for the different platforms:

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

Please be aware that you can enjoy enterprise features and sponsor the open source development directly by buying Phusion Passenger Enterprise.