Using Phusion Passenger with Nginx

Some operators don't like running important services in the Java Virtual Machine, for various reasons, such as its memory requirements. As of Puppet 4, alternatives to puppetserver are still available, so the requirement can be avoided.

The best way to run the master without the JVM is a web server with a support for Passenger. In this context, the Puppet master runs as a Rack application. The most common setup comprises the Apache web server and mod_passenger. Setting this up is quite straightforward and documentation is plentiful. We will therefore, concentrate on an attractive alternative.

Unfortunately, the Puppet 4 package cannot be made to work with Passenger easily. The best way to achieve this was a manual Puppet installation from the source, at the time of writing this. With Puppet 3.x, Passenger was the default for a long time, and making it work with Nginx is quite simple with the following instructions.

Note

Please note that in Puppet 4, the...