Passenger 6.0.3 Restarting the Releases

by Camden Narzt

Version 6.0.3 of the Passenger application server has been released. As you may have noted this release took much longer than usual and delayed support for Ubuntu 19.04, we have our CI system back up and running, and can cut releases again.

Passenger 6, introduced Generic Language Support, or: the ability to support any and all arbitrary apps.

Specify Spawn Dir Location

Passenger 6.0.3 adds an option to specify the app spawn directory during startup, which is specifically useful for CageFS users. Contributed by @plmnikulin.

- Apache: `PassengerSpawnDir`
- Nginx: `passenger_spawn_dir`

This addition closes issue GH-2145.

Updates & improvements

  • [Nginx] Bumps the preferred Nginx version to 1.17.3 (previously 1.15.8).

  • [Nginx] The preferred PCRE version is now 8.43 (previously 8.42).

  • Adds Ubuntu 19.04 "Disco" packages, and removes Ubuntu 18.10 "Cosmic" and Ubuntu 14.04 "Trusty" packages.

  • Changes minimum supported macOS version to 10.12 Sierra.

  • Improves container detection and fixes a compilation warning in GCC 8+. Closes GH-2186.

  • Allowed externally specifying an app instance to send a request to. Contributed by Mark R. James (@mrj).

  • Fixed an incompatibility with sending requests to specific app instances, when using the rails web-console gem. Contributed by Mark R. James (@mrj).

  • Fixed a regression (introduced in 5.1.9) where some hooks were not called. Closes GH-2103. Contributed by Mark R. James (@mrj).

  • Fixes compilation with clang 8 (latest macOS update) by updating vendored boost library from 1.67 to 1.69.

  • Reverts a regression introduced in 6.0.2 where Passenger would crash if it had to use the disk backed response cache. Closes GH-2189.

  • [Nginx] Adds an option passenger_buffer_upload to allow buffering uploaded data in Passenger before forwarding it to the app. As a workaround for apps that cannot handle chunked data.

  • [Enterprise] When using deferred port binding, no longer binds port if all apps do not start up.

  • Updated various library versions used in precompiled binaries (used for e.g. gem installs):

    • PCRE 8.43 (was 8.42)
    • Curl 7.65.1 (was 7.64.0)
    • ccache 3.7.3 (was 3.6)
    • Git 2.22.0 (was 2.20.1)
    • OpenSSL 1.0.2s (was 1.0.2q)
    • RubyGems 3.0.6 (was 3.0.2)
    • GnuPG 2.2.16 (was 2.2.13)
    • libgcrypt 1.8.5 (was 1.8.4)
    • libgpg_error 1.36 (was 1.35)
    • libiconv 1.16 (was 1.15)
    • Ruby:
      • 2.4.5 -> 2.4.6
      • 2.5.3 -> 2.5.5
      • 2.6.1 -> 2.6.3

What's next?

You may have noticed we didn't add packages for Debian Buster in this release. We have to make some changes to our buildbox first and didn't want to further delay this release until that was done. A release supporting Debian Buster (and CentOS 8 if it's out by then) will be released shortly.

Installing 6.0.3

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 6.0.3

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.