Upgrading Passenger + Apache
through source tarball

This guide teaches you how to upgrade Passenger + Apache to the latest version. It assumes that Passenger + Apache was installed through a source tarball. Is this not the case? Go back to the upgrade guide index.

Table of contents

Upgrade instructions

Step 1: download and extract latest tarball

Download the latest Passenger source tarball.

Download tarball

Extract the tarball to the same directory as where your current Passenger installation is located. For example, if Passenger was located in /opt/passenger-5.0.12, then extract the tarball to /opt. Replace X.X.X with the Passenger version you downloaded.

$ tar -xzvf passenger-X.X.X.tar.gz -C /opt

Step 2: update Passenger PATH entry

While installing the previous Passenger version, you added its bin directory to PATH, so that your shell can locate the previous Passenger version's commands. You need to update this PATH entry to point to the latest Passenger.

Open your shell's system-wide startup file. If you're using bash, this is usually /etc/bashrc or /etc/bash.bashrc. Inside that file, look for something like this:

PATH=/opt/passenger-PREVIOUS-VERSION-NUMBER/bin:$PATH

Replace it with:

PATH=/opt/passenger-CURRENT-VERSION-NUMBER/bin:$PATH

When you're done, restart all your shells so that your new PATH takes effect.

Make sure your bashrc is actually included by your bash profile, which might not be the case if you created the user with useradd instead of adduser for example.

Step 3: re-run the Passenger Apache module installer

Re-run the Passenger Apache module installer in order to upgrade the Passenger Apache module to the latest version. Follow the on-screen instructions:

$ passenger-install-apache2-module

When done, don't forget to update the configuration snippet in your Apache config file, as instructed by the installer.

Different operating systems and Apache installations have different conventions with regard to where the Apache configuration file is and how it is organized. Please read Working with the Apache configuration file if you are not familiar with it. That page is especially of interest for macOS Server >= 10.8 users because the configuration file may be at a surprising location.

Step 4: restart Apache

Restart Apache using the following command. Note that you must stop and start Apache. Just restarting it or reloading it is not enough.

$ sudo apache2ctl stop &&
  sudo apache2ctl start

On some systems, the command may be apachectl instead of apache2ctl.

Step 5: remove old version

Remove the previous Passenger version:

$ sudo rm -rf /opt/passenger-X.X.X

Step 6: validate installation

After installation, please validate the install by running sudo passenger-config validate-install. For example:

$ sudo passenger-config validate-install
 * Checking whether this Phusion Passenger install is in PATH... ✓
 * Checking whether there are no other Phusion Passenger installations... ✓

All checks should pass. If any of the checks do not pass, please follow the suggestions on screen.

Finally, check whether Apache has started the Passenger core processes. Run sudo passenger-memory-stats. You should see Apache processes as well as Passenger processes. For example:

$ sudo passenger-memory-stats
Version: 5.0.8
Date   : 2015-05-28 08:46:20 +0200

---------- Apache processes ----------
PID    PPID   VMSize    Private  Name
--------------------------------------
3918   1      190.1 MB  0.1 MB   /usr/sbin/apache2
...

----- Passenger processes ------
PID    VMSize    Private   Name
--------------------------------
12517  83.2 MB   0.6 MB    Passenger watchdog
12520  266.0 MB  3.4 MB    Passenger core
12531  149.5 MB  1.4 MB    Passenger ust-router
...

If you do not see any Apache processes or Passenger processes, then you probably have some kind of installation problem or configuration problem. Please refer to the troubleshooting guide.

Upgrading Passenger + Apache through source tarball