Passenger now provides Debian 8, Ubuntu 15.04 and Red Hat packages. This makes Ruby deployment easier than ever.

The availability of RPMs allows users who are on Red Hat or CentOS systems to deploy Passenger and Ruby at scale.

Development of the RPMs have literally taken 1.5 years. Due to limited man power, due to the difficulties of conforming to Red Hat and Fedora packaging guidelines, and due to the complexity of learning SELinux (the security mechanism which powers all Red Hat and CentOS systems), we have been developing RPMs on and off. But we have made significant progress in the past month.

I literally had to spend a few weeks to become an SELinux expert just to be able to finish these packages. Documentation on SELinux is very bad. The best resource about it is a book from 2004. Making these packages took 10x more time than I hoped it would.

Hope you guys enjoy it. We’ve gone through all this to make your lives easier.