Phusion Passenger Cheatsheet

Phusion Passenger is a fast web application server for Ruby, Node.js, and Python web applications.

Nginx Server Block Configuration

server {
    listen 80;
    server_name www.example.com;

    # Point root directory to application 'public' directory
    root /var/www/myapp/public;

    # Turn on Passenger
    passenger_enabled on;
    passenger_ruby /usr/bin/ruby;

    # Environment mode (production / development)
    passenger_app_env production;

    # Node.js or Python application options (if applicable)
    # passenger_app_type node;
    # passenger_startup_file app.js;
}

Application Restarts

Restart application without stopping web server:

# Touch restart.txt to trigger rolling reload
mkdir -p /var/www/myapp/tmp
touch /var/www/myapp/tmp/restart.txt

CLI Management Commands

# Inspect running Passenger processes and memory
passenger-status

# View process tree and requests queue
passenger-memory-stats

# Restart application via CLI
passenger-config restart-app /var/www/myapp
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