I was researching to set up my linux (ubuntu) vps for rails. And almost all of the guides I’ve read tells me to install passenger. But none of the guides explain what it is (atleast not in simple terms). So I was wondering if someone could explain in simple terms what exactly passenger is.
I’m trying to set up my VPS so I can easily push code to it from git, and deploy my app (Easy as heroku?) Any suggestions?
Your web server (apache/nginx) serves HTTP requests for files, like stylesheets and images. But, it doesn’t know how to process programming code. In PHP, for example, you have to enable mod_php to allow PHP to run.
Passenger is to ruby/rails what mod_php is to PHP.
Your web server still serves static files, but has passenger run your ruby code.