Intro: What is Passenger, and why I want to use it

I seriously want to love Passenger Standalone, I really do. Certain client projects of mine could use the increased speed, and I’d love to use Passenger Standalone for production deploys too (more on that in a future article).

But it seems like I’m running into every problem under the sun installing this thing. Here are my solutions to these problems.

Problems & Solutions

I ran passenger start and it downloads and compiles things, then fails with sh: line 0: cd: ext/libev/: No such file or directory

Thanks to this issue on the Passenger Google Code site I found out my CDPATH needed to contain ”.“.

Solution:

$ export CDPATH=.:$CDPATH and redo passenger start

I ran passenger start, it downloads and compiled everything, now I get: the following error during startup: Unable to start the Phusion Passenger logging agent because its executable (....passenger/standalone/3.0.6...-macosx-10.6/support/agents/PassengerLoggingAgent) doesn't exist

Thanks to this Google Group conversation the best way to deal with this issue is to:

1. $ passenger package-runtime. This will create a passenger-standalone folder in your current directory, with a folder (3.0.6…macosx-10.6). This folder will have a support.tar.gz and a nginx-0.8.5.4.tar.gz file.
2. Note where it says the file is missing from (standalone/3.0.6…-macosx-10.6, in the case above), and go ~/.passenger/(that directory). Trash the support folder that’s there, and extract the support.tar.gz file (from step 1) in this directory

Conclusion

That took a lot more debugging than it should have (or, to be fair, than it has in the past). But I eventually got Passenger Standalone running. Now that yack is shaved, I hope this blog entry helps others with similar issues