Deploying application updates
with Passenger in Nginx mode

In the previous step, you deployed an application to your production server for the first time. But what do you do when you have updated your app, and need to deploy updates? You will learn that on this page.

1 Transferring latest code

1.1 Login to the server as the application's user

Login to your server with SSH:

local-computer$ ssh -i your_ec2_key.pem myappuser@yourserver.com

Replace myappuser with name of the application's OS user account.

1.2 Pull latest code from Git

Go to your application's code directory on the server, then use Git to pull the latest code:

$ cd /var/www/myapp/code
$ git pull

2 Prepare application

2.1 Install app dependencies

Your application's npm dependencies may have changed, so we should install any updated npm dependencies while removing any now-extraneous dependencies. Run:

$ npm install --production
$ npm prune --production

3 Restart application

Passenger may still be serving an old instance of your application. Now that all application updates have been prepared, tell Passenger to restart your application so that the updates take effect.

$ passenger-config restart-app $(pwd)

Next step