Phusion Passenger users guide, Apache version

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Please consult the Phusion Passenger website for a full list of support resources.

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Please refer to our Heroku Ruby demo for installation and upgrade instructions for Heroku.

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If one of your application processes is frozen (stopped responding), then you can figure out where it is frozen by killing it with SIGABRT. This will cause the processs to print a backtrace, after which it aborts. The backtrace information is logged into the web server error log file.

In case of Ruby applications, you can also send the SIGQUIT signal to have it print a backtrace without aborting.

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Phusion Passenger automatically leverages operating system virtual memory copy-on-write features in order to reduce the memory usage of Ruby applications. Experience has shown that this reduces memory usage by 33% on average. For this mechanism to work, a Ruby interpreter with a copy-on-write friendly garbage collector is required. The following Ruby interpreters have copy-on-write friendly garbage collectors:

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Each Ruby on Rails applications that are going to be deployed may require a specific Ruby on Rails version. You can install a specific version with this command:

where X.X.X is the version number of Ruby on Rails.

All of these versions will exist in parallel, and will not conflict with each other. Phusion Passenger will automatically make use of the correct version.

In some situations it might be desirable to restart the web application after each request, for example when developing a non-Rails application that doesn’t support code reloading, or when developing a web framework.

To achieve this, simply create the file tmp/always_restart.txt in your application’s root folder. Unlike restart.txt, Phusion Passenger does not check for this file’s timestamp: Phusion Passenger will always restart the application, as long as always_restart.txt exists.

Some people experience broken images and other broken static assets when they deploy their application to a sub-URI (i.e. http://mysite.com/railsapp/). The reason for this usually is that you used a static URI for your image in the views. This means your img source probably refers to something like /images/foo.jpg. The leading slash means that it’s an absolute URI: you’re telling the browser to always load http://mysite.com/images/foo.jpg no matter what. The problem is that the image is actually at http://mysite.com/railsapp/images/foo.jpg. There are two ways to fix this.

The first way (not recommended) is to change your view templates to refer to images/foo.jpg. This is a relative URI: note the lack of a leading slash). What this does is making the path relative to the current URI. The problem is that if you use restful URIs, then your images will probably break again when you add a level to the URI. For example, when you’re at http://mysite.com/railsapp the browser will look for http://mysite.com/railsapp/images/foo.jpg. But when you’re at http://mysite.com/railsapp/controller. the browser will look for http://mysite.com/railsapp/controller/images/foo.jpg. So relative URIs usually don’t work well with layout templates.

The second and highly recommended way is to always use Rails helper methods to output tags for static assets. These helper methods automatically take care of prepending the base URI that you’ve deployed the application to. For images there is image_tag, for JavaScript there is javascript_include_tag and for CSS there is stylesheet_link_tag. In the above example you would simply remove the <img> HTML tag and replace it with inline Ruby like this:

This will generate the proper image tag to $RAILS_ROOT/public/images/foo.jpg so that your images will always work no matter what sub-URI you’ve deployed to.

These helper methods are more valuable than you may think. For example they also append a timestamp to the URI to better facilitate HTTP caching. For more information, please refer to the Rails API docs.

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Phusion Passenger does not provide X-Sendfile support by itself. Please install mod_xsendfile for X-Sendfile support.

Phusion Passenger does not provide upload progress support by itself. Please try drogus’s Apache upload progress module instead.

For each HTTP request, Phusion Passenger will automatically look for a corresponding page cache file, and serve that if it exists. It does this by appending ".html" to the filename that the URI normally maps to, and checking whether that file exists. This check occurs after checking whether the original mapped filename exists (as part of static asset serving). All this is done without the need for special mod_rewrite rules.

For example, suppose that the browser requests /foo/bar.

Note that Phusion Passenger’s page caching support doesn’t work if your web application uses a non-standard page cache directory, i.e. if it doesn’t cache to the public directory. In that case you’ll need to use mod_rewrite to serve such page cache files.

Phusion Passenger accelerates serving of static files. This means that, if an URI maps to a file that exists, then Phusion Passenger will let Apache serve that file directly, without hitting the web application.

Phusion Passenger does all this without the need for any mod_rewrite rules. People who are switching from an old Mongrel-based setup might have mod_rewrite rules such as these:

These kind of mod_rewrite rules are no longer required, and you can safely remove them.

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The root directory of an application that’s served by Phusion Passenger.

In case of Ruby on Rails applications, this is the directory that contains Rakefile, app/, config/, public/, etc. In other words, the directory pointed to by RAILS_ROOT. For example, take the following directory structure:

In case of Rack applications, this is the directory that contains config.ru. For example, take the following directory structure:

In case of Python (WSGI) applications, this is the directory that contains passenger_wsgi.py. For example, take the following directory structure:

An "idle process" refers to a process that hasn’t processed any requests for a while.

An "inactive process" refers to a process that’s current not processing any requests. An idle process is always inactive, but an inactive process is not always considered idle.

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