Version 6.0 of the Passenger application server has been released. Earlier this year we launched our all-new Passenger Docs, replacing the 'Library'. And this year spring we celebrated our 10 year anniversary.

Our early days far behind us, over 650.000 applications came to rely on Passenger. But paraphrasing Sean Parker, Napster founder and early Facebook investor: "A million apps isn't cool. You know what is cool? A billion apps."

Generic Language Support

Per overwhelming request from language communities Passenger didn’t previously support out-of-the-box - from fringe frameworks to the likes of .NET - we added support for all languages to Passenger 6. For languages we consider first class citizens, Rust, Go, Elixir, Swift and Java, we've added detailed tutorials.

With microservices and containers, the world is becoming increasingly polyglot. Every language reinvents tooling and duplicates efforts, and the quality and usability of these vary wildly. With Passenger 6 / GLS (Generic Language Support) we aim to provide the benefits of Passenger to more people. Using Passenger across your stack ensures standardization, allowing teams to move faster and with more confidence.

Updates & improvements

  • Bumps the preferred Nginx version to 1.15.7.
  • Introduces a new option "passenger_request_buffering on|off", to allow disabling request body buffering. This is only supported in Nginx >= 1.15.3. Closes GH-2121.
  • Adds usage telemetry. In order to improve our product, we track the amount of requests handled by, as well as the version number and edition of Passenger (open source versus Enterprise) you're running. Find out how to disable data collection.

Installing 6.0

Please see the installation guide for advice on getting started with Passenger. Coming from a language other than Ruby, Python, Meteor or Node? Even if we didn't write a specific tutorial for your language, we made a generic guide that shows you the steps.

Upgrading to 6.0

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

Check out our upgrade guides for the different platforms:

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