mod_passenger options - invalid command

Question

I have a Ubuntu server(11.10) and use mod_passenger for Redmine. It works pretty well, but somehow slow on first run (once in a while).

I've googled and came up into this: http://www.modrails.com/documentation/Users%20guide%20Apache.html#PassengerMinInstances

However I can't setup any of the specified options. They just don't work. I've tried in:

• apache2/sites-avalible/redmine
• apache2/mods-avalible/passenger.conf
• apache2/httpd.conf

Wherever I put a command like 'PassengerMinInstances 3' and try to reload Apache I get:

Syntax error on line 9 of /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/redmine:
Invalid command 'PassengerMinInstances', perhaps misspelled or defined by a module not included in the server configuration
Action 'configtest' failed.
The Apache error log may have more information.
...fail!

Ofcourse the lines and files differ. Logs don't hold anything related.

Answer 1

Ubuntu ships with an older Passenger version that not yet supports the PassengerMinInstances option.

As an alternative you could set PassengerPoolIdleTime and PassengerMaxRequests to a rather high value to prevent idle instances to be recycled.

You could also use the Ubuntu package provided by Phusion. See http://wiki.brightbox.co.uk/docs:phusion-passenger for more information about that

Finally, you could also install the current version of Passenger using rubygems. For that remove the libapache2-mod-passenger package and run this:

sudo aptitude purge libapache2-mod-passenger
sudo apt-get install rubygems build-essential apache2-prefork-dev libapr1-dev libssl-dev zlib1g-dev
sudo gem install passenger
sudo /var/lib/gems/1.8/bin/passenger-install-apache2-module

It will compile and install passenger. At the end, it will output some configuration values that you need to put in /etc/apache2/mods-available/passenger.load.

Then enable passenger by running

sudo a2enmod passenger
sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

and everything should be well.