Hey everyone!
I wanted to give a quick update about our Phusion Passenger and Ruby support. The initial work I mentioned previously to overhaul our packaging and deployment system is complete and those packages will be released to all servers soon. That lays the groundwork for the following changes…
We will begin the process of updating all servers to a newer version of Phusion Passenger (the 4.0 branch) in November. That deployment will allow you to use any version of Ruby — including 1.9 and 2.0 — inside your Rack-based applications (e.g. Rails).
We will then begin work on changing the default Ruby across our entire fleet from Ruby 1.8.7 to 1.9.3. You will receive ample notification for this change, but if your application only functions on Ruby 1.8.7, you will be able to change the Ruby version per-application and per-account (via .htaccess) using the PassengerRuby option available in Phusion Passenger 4. You can then compile your own version of Ruby 1.8 inside of your account for your legacy applications.
Additional work is also being done on improving the entire user Ruby environment to make it easy to install and maintain your Rubies and their gemsets. This part is still very much in the development stages, but we’ll have more information once it’s ready.
