Do I need to install nginx during the passenger installation

Question

I am trying to install Passenger for Nginx:

$ gem install passenger
$ passenger-install-nginx-module

During the installation Passenger want to compile and install Nginx. Is it necessary step?

I have checked my installation and found that I have already installed Nginx with Passenger module:

appls:/www/redmine # zypper se passenger
Loading repository data...
Reading installed packages...

S | Name                      | Summary                                          | Type   
--+---------------------------+--------------------------------------------------+--------
i | rubygem-passenger         | Easy and robust Ruby web application deployment  | package
  | rubygem-passenger-apache2 | Passenger apache module                          | package
i | rubygem-passenger-nginx   | Passenger Nginx module for Ruby on Rails support | package

Can I skip Nginx installation during Passenger setup?

Answer 1

You need to recompile nginx with passenger enabled. Per the manual of passenger. (My DNS is broken so I will update this answer with the link once it's back up.)

If I'm not mistaken that's also what the installer tells you. Maybe there is a pre-packaged version of NGINX + Passenger for your distribution?

---

Update: You can try with the following configuration whether you can use passenger. Also look for a passenger_root variable in one of your configs. Otherwise, try to locate the passenger software on your system.

passenger_enabled on;
root /var/sites/redmine/public;

If the passenger_root variable is not there, try to add it to http{}

passenger_root /opt/ruby-enterprise-1.8.7-2011.03/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/passenger-3.0.7;
passenger_ruby /opt/ruby-enterprise-1.8.7-2011.03/bin/ruby;

These paths are from my system.

Answer 2

If you're updating passenger via the gem but your passenger nginx module is from your distro's repository, there could be a version mismatch, so I'd recommend doing the nginx install. Since nginx doesn't do dynamically loaded modules (they're linked in at build time) you need to rebuild it with the latest passenger module each time you update assuming the C parts of the nginx module have changed between updates.