Phusion Passenger on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS

Phusion Passenger is a mature, open source application server that serves Ruby, Node.js and Python web applications through nginx. It spawns and supervises your application processes, load balances requests across workers, automatically restarts crashed workers, and supports zero downtime application restarts, with clear operational visibility through passenger-status and passenger-memory-stats.

This cloudimg image installs Passenger 6.1 (open source edition) integrated with nginx via the official Phusion APT repository, alongside distro Ruby 3.2 with Rack and Node.js 22 LTS with Express, so the polyglot runtime is real, not a claim. Passenger has no admin console or login, so the image ships two small demo apps pre-deployed and served through Passenger: a Ruby (Rack) app at the site root and a Node.js (Express) app at a second path, each running as a distinct Passenger application group. Both render a live server timestamp and worker PID that change on every request, proving genuine per-request execution across two languages.

The image is secure by default: friendly error pages are disabled so application stack traces are never shown to clients, server tokens are off, and Passenger anonymous telemetry and the security-update phone-home are disabled. nginx on port 80 is the only public entry point and there is no baked credential. Ubuntu 24.04 LTS ships with the latest security patches applied at build time and stays current through unattended upgrades.

Passenger open source edition is MIT licensed, free with no per-CPU or per-deployment fee. cloudimg provides 24/7 commercial support with a guaranteed 24 hour response SLA, separate from the upstream open source project.