Passenger standalone restart-app not working after update to 5.0.18

Question

After update to version 5.0.18 passenger standalone refuses to perform graceful restart with command passenger-config restart-app if there are several passenger intances running on the same machine.

Configuration:

• ruby 2.2.3
• cuba
• passenger standalone 5.0.14 and 5.0.18 involved
• reproduced on Mint 17.1 and CentOS 6.4

For example, two passengers with application group names sample_app1 and sample_app2 are running, from folder sample1 and from folder sample2. passenger-config restart-app surprisingly detects several passenger instances even if full path to application folder or application group name passed:

$ passenger-config restart-app path_to_app/sample1
$ passenger-config restart-app --name sample_app1
$ cd path_to_app/sample1 && passenger-config restart-app .

These commands produce the same output:

It appears that multiple Phusion Passenger instances are running. Please select
a specific one by passing:

  --instance 

The following Phusion Passenger instances are running:

Name                       Description
------------------------------------------------------------------
oithHie6                   nginx/1.8.0 Phusion_Passenger/5.0.14
uftk5e6O                   nginx/1.8.0 Phusion_Passenger/5.0.18

Is there any other way to make passenger restart gracefully, without using --instance option? Any ideas would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

This is normal, even in versions before 5.0.18. Passenger Standalone does not run multiple apps inside the same Passenger instances. Instead, you are starting up multiple Passenger instances. Passing a path to passenger-config restart-app only selects the app within a specific Passenger instance, but does not select which Passenger instance you want to communicate with.

You can solve this problem by setting a different instance registry dir per app, so that it is unambiguous which Passenger instance you are communicating with: https://www.phusionpassenger.com/library/config/standalone/reference/#--instance-registry-dir-instance_registry_dir