Version 6.2.1 of the Passenger application server has been released. This release changes the minimum supported macOS version to 15 (Sequoia), drops Debian 11 Bullseye for being end-of-life (EOL 2026-08-31), and adds packages for Ubuntu 26.10 "stonking". In addition, this release improves compatibility with SELinux and Ruby frozen strings, improves error reporting, and upgrades several libraries used by Passenger.

Other Improvements

  • Improve SELinux compatibility. Closes GH-2630 & GH-2670.
  • Improve header parsing resilience. Closes GH-2646.
  • [Ruby] Improve Frozen String compatibility. Closes GH-2659.
  • Fix OpenSSL deprecation warnings. Closes GH-2673.
  • Fix an occasional Passenger core crash after serving a large response that Passenger generates itself, such as an application error page.
  • Fix a rare Passenger core crash when a request ended at about the same moment as its connection attempt to the application timed out.

Improved error reporting

  • Make 503 error prettier on mobile by adding a viewport meta-tag.
  • [Standalone] Improve detecting Nginx startup error messages. Closes GH-1970.
  • Fix reporting of application output printed during smart spawning preloader startup.
  • Include captured subprocess output in application spawn failure messages in logs, allowing easier troubleshooting without reading the HTML report.
  • passenger-config reopen-logs now reopens both stdout and stderr, and can exit successfully when Passenger is not running by passing --ignore-passenger-not-running. Closes GH-2259.

Upgraded libraries

  • Upgrade vendored libuv from 1.8.0 to 1.49.2, to pick up a decade of BSD/kqueue and threadpool bug fixes that should fix GH-2569.
  • Upgrade vendored libev from 4.23 to 4.33.
  • [Nginx] Upgrades preferred Nginx to 1.30.6 from 1.30.4.
  • [Nginx] The preferred PCRE2 version is now 10.49 (previously 10.47).
  • Updated various library versions used in precompiled binaries (used for e.g. gem installs):
    • ccache: 4.13.6 -> 4.14.1
    • cmake: 4.4.2 -> 4.4.4
    • curl: 8.21.0 -> 8.23.0
    • git: 2.55.0 -> 2.56.0
    • openssl: 3.6.3 -> 3.6.5
    • pcre2: 10.47 -> 10.49
    • rubygems: 4.0.18 -> 4.0.23
    • rubies:
      • 3.4.10 -> 3.4.11
      • 4.0.6 -> 4.0.7

Installing 6.2.1

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 6.2.1

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.