Getting ready

Although there are a number of different application servers for Rails, one of the more popular is Passenger. With the highest performance and great documentation, Passenger's popularity is well deserved. This recipe has been tested with Ruby 2.3, Rails 4.2, and Passenger 5.0.

We can install Passenger via gem:

gem install passenger

To integrate with NGINX, this requires a special module to be enabled. We'll compile NGINX from scratch as per our installation in Chapter 1, Let's Get Started and compile Passenger support as a static module.

For a Debian- / Ubuntu-based system, you'll need to create the build environment:

apt-get build-dep Nginx
mkdir ~/nginxbuild
cd ~/nginxbuild
apt-get source nginx

Then, in the NGINX source directory, edit the debian/rules file to add:

--add-module=/var/lib/gems/2.3.0/gems/passenger-5.0.27/src/nginx_module \

You can confirm the passenger directory with the following command:

passenger-config --nginx-addon-dir

To make the package name unique, you can edit the changelog and add additional lines to the changelog. Consider this example:

nginx (1.9.14-1-passenger) wily; urgency=low 
 
  * Added Passenger as a dynamic module 

You can now compile the package with the following command:

fakeroot debian/rules binary

This will take a few minutes to complete. Once we have the updated package, we can now install it:

dpkg -i ../nginx_1.9.14-1-passenger_amd64.deb