We're excited to announce that we'll be streaming a coding session. It will take place on November 1, 5 PM UTC.

  • 6 PM CET / 1 PM EDT / 10 AM PDT
  • Use Worldtime Buddy for conversion to your local timezone.

The livestream is free for everyone to join.

Generic Language Support implementation live stream
Nov 1st, 5 PM UTC
YouTube Live

How we're going to support every app

Back in 2008 I created the Passenger app server because Rails deployment was hard. Fast-forward 10 years, add the rise of countless other languages, frameworks and the containerization of apps and you'd be right to claim that in 2018 DevOps is hard.

Supporting all arbitrary programming languages ('Generic Language Support') has long been on our roadmap and a much requested (Enterprise) feature. The foundation for Generic Language Support was already laid in 5.3.0, albeit not visible to users, when we implemented generic spawn flow.

Being big fans of standardization, we decided to roll out support for all apps in Passenger Enterprise AND Passenger Open Source.

Implementing this game-changing feature seemed like the opportune moment to introduce a wider audience to the internals of Passenger's design1, and eventually invite more people to contribute to the Passenger project on GitHub.

In the November 1st livestream I will explain how we generally go about engineering a feature for Phusion Passenger. Starting with how Passenger is architected and how we approach writing (C++) code, I'll dive deeper into matters of security and performance. The writing code part will be pre-recorded, but I will be answering your questions live, and I look forward to your feedback.

What about that raffle?!

The people who registered (registration is now closed) participate to win:

  • 5 x Passenger Enterprise for free for 3 months 🤑
  • 10 x Passenger beanie ❄️
  • 15 x custom Passenger keycap ⌨️
  • Passenger 6.0 stickers (unlimited)

Request for comments


A nice-to-read, explicitely not need-to-read, is this spec of the Generic Language Support feature. We would like to get your feedback on these questions:

  • How could GLS benefit you? How should we change Passenger to address your use cases for today and for tomorrow?
  • Are the proposed mechanisms viable?
  • Is the proposed UX desirable?

Let us know by posting a comment!