Is Passenger Deprecated for Nginx versions above 1.14?

Question

I updated nginx from version 1.14 to 1.18 (Ubuntu) on Ubuntu 18.04.

Doing so appeared to break passenger. So I uninstalled and attempted to reinstall the Open Source Passenger version via the Passenger installation Ubuntu 18.04 instructions.

I got to this line:

sudo apt-get install -y libnginx-mod-http-passenger

Which throws this error

libnginx-mod-http-passenger : Depends: nginx-common (< 1.14.1) but 1.18.0-3ubuntu1+bionic1 is to be installed

Update I also attempted with the enterprise version. Following the enterprise version installation instructions, I received a similar error message:

libnginx-mod-http-passenger-enterprise : Depends: nginx-common (< 1.14.1) but 1.18.0-3ubuntu1+bionic1 is to be installed

I did attempt to research the issue and I found this issue on Phusion's GitHub as well as this more recent issue. It appears that what most people are doing is rolling back their nginx version to 1.14.

Answer 1

It is not deprecated, no. The problem is that the packaged module you are trying to install was made for an older Nginx version that is distributed through the system default repository. This appears in the installation guide that you've mentioned:

At this point we assume that you already have Nginx installed from your system repository.

What this means is that it is assumed that you have a specific version of Nginx (1.14.0 in your case) installed, for which the packaged module was built. This is emphasized in the new passenger documentation:

If you want to use our packaged Nginx module, you must use your distro's provided Nginx package. If for example you have the repo provided by NGINX setup, you will instead need to compile a dynamic module compatible with that Nginx.

The link in the last quote will bring you to the guide on how to compile a dynamic passenger module and enable it in Nginx configuration. I will not repeat the whole process to keep the answer short but the general approach is this:

1. Get passenger module for Nginx source code.
2. Get Nginx source code for the version you have installed.
3. Compile Nginx with the passenger module:

cd /path-to-nginx-source-dir
./configure --prefix=/opt/nginx \
  --with-some-configure-flag \
  --add-dynamic-module=$(passenger-config --nginx-addon-dir) \
  --add-module=/path-to-some-other-nginx-module
make
sudo make install

4. Make Nginx to load the module by adding this line to nginx.conf:

load_module modules/ngx_http_passenger_module.so;

Personally, I'd rather chosen the 'nginx-behind-nginx' approach than building the module. That is you have Nginx any version you like but it runs as a reverse proxy for another Nginx with passenger enabled (Passenger Standalone). With an unnoticeable penalty to performance this will be much easier to maintain (install, update). See this guide for details.