Upgrading Passenger Standalone
through source tarball

This guide teaches you how to upgrade Passenger Standalone to the latest version. It assumes that Passenger Standalone 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: restart Passenger Standalone

Go to your application directory and restart Passenger Standalone, like this:

$ cd /var/www/yourapp
$ passenger stop;
  passenger start

Using sudo?

Was your previous Passenger Standalone instance run with sudo privileges? Then instead of following the above instructions, follow these instructions involving sudo:

$ cd /var/www/yourapp
$ sudo passenger stop;
  sudo passenger start

Of course, if you are an RVM user, be sure to use rvmsudo instead of sudo.

Step 4: remove old version

Remove the previous Passenger version:

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

Step 5: 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.

Upgrading Passenger Standalone through source tarball