Capistrano start/stop/restart tasks for Phusion Passsenger Standalone

deploy.md

With the introduction of Phusion Passenger Standalone, some of the established wisdom with regards to Capistrano tasks for managing Passenger are a tad outdated.

In particular, the start and stop tasks for Passenger are typically NOOPs, and only the restart task is deemed relevant. This is arguably no longer the case for standalone Passenger, where start and stop tasks do make sense, as they did back in the mongrel days.

The following Capistrano tasks illustrate how to start, stop and restart a standalone Passenger setup.

These tasks are for a Passenger setup that uses Unix domain sockets, but they can easily be modified for Passenger instances configured for TCP sockets.

    namespace :deploy do
      task :start, :roles => :app, :except => { :no_release => true } do
        run "cd #{current_path} && bundle exec passenger start --socket /tmp/passenger.socket --daemonize --environment production"
      end
      task :stop, :roles => :app, :except => { :no_release => true } do
        run "cd #{current_path} && bundle exec passenger stop --pid-file tmp/pids/passenger.pid"
      end
      task :restart, :roles => :app, :except => { :no_release => true } do
        run "#{try_sudo} touch #{File.join(current_path, 'tmp', 'restart.txt')}"
      end
    end

I found this thread on passenger google group, from what it says your restart task isn't going to work, because if you don't restart your app the process working directory doesn't change. What do you think about that?

When you use bundled Passenger Standalone using bundle exec passenger touching tmp/restart.txt doesn't restart application properly. Especially your application won't see new, freshly bundled gems. You need to restart Passenger by stopping and starting.

This reset task should work fine with a Github Style deploy because it does not require change directories.