How to Update Phusion Passenger When Installed via RubyGems

Pair of feet sticking out of a car window
Photo by Erik Odiin on Unsplash

Phusion Passenger (a.k.a. mod_rails) is a module for the Apache HTTP Server which can (among other things) be used to deploy Rails apps.

As with any piece of software, from time to time security vulnerabilities will be discovered and Passenger will need to be updated.

Although the project’s homepage offers some excellent documentation on how to do this, the steps they describe didn’t work for me and resulted in my app crashing.

Inspecting the Apache error logs informed me that a segmentation fault had occurred and that I may have encountered a bug in the Ruby interpreter. This was accompanied by a 5,000 line stack trace.

Oh dear!

Let’s Start at the Beginning

If you installed Passenger via RubyGems, the update guide (linked to above) recommends that you simply repeat the normal installation process.

This is as follows:

Install the Gem

Easy enough.

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

Note that the --no-rdoc --no-ri argument makes installation faster by skipping generation of API documentation. You can also avoid specifying this every time you install a gem by adding this to a .gemrc file in your home directory and restarting your terminal.

cd && touch .gemrc
echo "gem: --no-rdoc --no-ri" > .gemrc
source ~/.bashrc

Run the Passenger Apache Module Installer

Step 2 takes you into an install wizard, where you will be asked what you want to install (Ruby, Node etc).

passenger-install-apache2-module

Passenger will then compile the Apache module. Depending on how much RAM you have available, this might take some time.

Once Passenger is done, it’ll spit out a configuration snippet which you should paste into your Apache configuration file.

Finally, it’ll ask you to restart Apache with sudo service apache2 reload.

This is where my problems started …

Segmentation Fault

When I attempted to restart Apache, my app went into 404 mode and became unreachable.

Inspecting /var/log/apache2/error.log revealed a very long error message.

App 108939 output: /var/www/app/shared/bundle/ruby/2.5.0/gems/celluloid-0.17.3/lib/celluloid/mailbox.rb:41:
App 108939 output: [BUG] Segmentation fault at 0x0000557b8e8ba731
App 108939 output: ruby 2.5.1p57 (2018-03-29 revision 63029) [x86_64-linux]
App 108939 output:
App 108939 output: -- Control frame information -----------------------------------------------
App 108939 output: c:0016 p:---- s:0076 e:000075 CFUNC  :signal
App 108939 output: c:0015 p:0075 s:0072 e:000071 METHOD /var/www/app/shared/bundle/ruby/2.5.0/gems/celluloid-0.17.3/lib/celluloid/mailbox.rb:41
App 108939 output: c:0014 p:0055 s:0067 e:000066 METHOD /var/www/app/shared/bundle/ruby/2.5.0/gems/celluloid-0.17.3/lib/celluloid/proxy/actor.rb:35
...

This had me scratching my head until about three quarters of the way down I found the following lines mentioning a “graceful restart”:

[Sat Jun 02 06:25:01.765420 2018] [mpm_prefork:notice] [pid 83397] AH00171: Graceful restart requested, doing restart

[ N 2018-06-02 06:25:01.7953 108669/T4 age/Cor/CoreMain.cpp:615 ]: Signal received. Gracefully shutting down... (send signal 2 more time(s) to force shutdown)
[ N 2018-06-02 06:25:01.7954 108669/T1 age/Cor/CoreMain.cpp:1148 ]: Received command to shutdown gracefully. Waiting until all clients have disconnected...
[ N 2018-06-02 06:25:01.7954 108669/T1 age/Cor/CoreMain.cpp:1062 ]: Checking whether to disconnect long-running connections for process 127768, application /var/www/app/current (production)

I’d never heard of a graceful restart, but a quick Google search turned up this page which stated:

The graceful signal causes the parent process to advise the children to exit after their current request (or to exit immediately if they’re not serving anything). The parent re-reads its configuration files and re-opens its log files. When a child dies off the parent replaces it with a child of the new generation of the configuration. This immediately begins serving new requests.

So I tried sending a graceful signal to Apache, like so:

apachectl graceful

and to my huge relief, the site came back up again.

After that I could complete the final step listed in the Passenger docs and verify the install:

sudo passenger-config validate-install

to which Passenger replied “Everything looks good. :-)”

Thanks passenger, I love you, too…

Comments