Installing Passenger Standalone
from RubyGems (with RVM)

This page describes the installation of Passenger through the following operating system or installation method: generic installation through RubyGems (with RVM). Not the configuration you are looking for? Go back to the operating system / installation method selection menu.

Table of contents

Installation

Step 1: install gem

Install the Passenger gem with:

$ gem install passenger --no-rdoc --no-ri

The --no-rdoc --no-ri argument isn't really necessary, but it makes installation faster by skipping generation of API documentation.

Did gem install abort with a "permission denied" error? Then re-run it with rvmsudo.

Since you are using RVM, don't use sudo! Always use rvmsudo instead when executing Ruby-related commands! Learn more about rvmsudo at the RVM website.

Step 2: validate installation

After installation, please validate the install by running rvmsudo passenger-config validate-install. For example:

$ rvmsudo passenger-config validate-install
 * Checking whether this Phusion Passenger install is in PATH... ✓
 * Checking whether there are no other Phusion Passenger installations... ✓

All checks should pass. If any of the checks do not pass, please follow the suggestions on screen.

FAQ

I have multiple Ruby versions or gemsets. Does it matter which one I use to install Passenger with?

Not really. Passenger doesn't care which Ruby you used to install it; it can still serve Ruby apps with any Ruby version, as long as you tell Passenger which Ruby interpreter you want to use.

You tell Passenger which Ruby interpreter to use by using the --ruby command line option.

Please also read How having multiple Ruby interpreters affects Passenger. In particular, read the RVM-related caveats.

Some of the dependent libraries are installed in non-standard locations. How do I allow the compiler to find them?

Please refer to Customizing the compilation process.

How do I pass additional flags to the compiler?