Uninstalling Passenger Enterprise + Nginx

Uninstalling Passenger Enterprise involves two steps. The first step is to remove the Passenger files. The second step is to remove any Passenger configuration from your system.

Step 1: remove the Passenger files

Removing the Passenger files depends on how you installed Passenger.

If Passenger is installed as follows... ...then do this
Phusion's APT repository for Debian/Ubuntu
sudo apt-get remove -y passenger-enterprise
Phusion's YUM repository for Red Hat/CentOS
sudo yum remove -y passenger-enterprise
macOS + Homebrew
brew uninstall passenger
Ruby gem
gem uninstall passenger-enterprise-server
Source tarball Remove the directory in which you placed the extracted Passenger files. This directory is the same as the one pointed to by the passenger_root configuration directive.

Step 2: remove Passenger configuration from system

Inspect all your Nginx configuration files, and remove any Passenger-related configuration options.

If you installed Passenger via a source tarball, then edit your shell startup file (e.g. /etc/bashrc) and ensure the Passenger bin directory is no longer in PATH.

Tip: Nginx does not need to be recompiled

Nginx does not have to be recompiled after uninstalling Passenger. Altough Nginx will contain the Passenger Nginx module, the module will not do anything when all Passenger configuration directives are removed.