Phusion Passenger App Server

This is a repackaged open source software product wherein additional charges apply for cloudimg support services.

## Phusion Passenger - Production-Ready Application Server AMI with 24/7 Expert Support

Launch a fully configured Phusion Passenger (open source edition) application server on EC2 and begin serving Ruby, Node.js and Python web applications within minutes. Passenger is a mature polyglot application server that runs inside nginx: it spawns and supervises your application processes, load balances requests across workers, restarts crashed workers automatically, and supports zero-downtime application restarts - with clear operational visibility through passenger-status and passenger-memory-stats.

## Why This AMI Over a Manual Install

• Instant time-to-value: nginx with the Passenger dynamic module is running the moment your instance boots - no APT repository setup, no module compilation, no configuration editing.
• Genuinely polyglot: distro Ruby with Rack and Node.js 22 LTS with Express are both installed, so the polyglot runtime is real, not a claim. Two demo apps ship pre-deployed and serving - a Ruby (Rack) app and a Node.js (Express) app as a separate Passenger application group.
• Expert support included: 24/7 technical assistance from cloudimg engineers covering Passenger deployment, nginx tuning, TLS configuration, application process management and zero-downtime restarts.

## Application Stack

• Phusion Passenger 6.1 open source edition, integrated with nginx via the official Phusion APT repository (libnginx-mod-http-passenger dynamic module)
• Distro Ruby with the Rack gem, and Node.js 22 LTS with Express - a genuinely polyglot runtime
• A Ruby (Rack) demo app at / and a Node.js (Express) demo app at /node, each a distinct Passenger application group, proving per-request execution
• passenger-firstboot systemd oneshot that starts nginx, confirms the demo app answers, and writes a non-secret endpoints notes file

## Security Posture

• No admin login surface: Passenger is an application server with no web console and no baked credential - there is nothing to authenticate to and no secret to rotate
• Secure by default: passenger_friendly_error_pages off (no application stack traces leak to clients), server_tokens off, Passenger anonymous telemetry and security-update phone-home disabled
• Unprivileged execution: the demo apps run as a dedicated unprivileged ppdemo system user; keep your own apps off root
• TLS readiness: TLS/HTTPS is not preconfigured out of the box, but cloudimg support can assist with fronting nginx with Certbot or terminating TLS at an Application Load Balancer

## AWS Integration Points

• Application Load Balancer: place this AMI behind an ALB for traffic distribution, health checks, and TLS termination at the load balancer tier
• Amazon CloudWatch: stream nginx and Passenger logs to CloudWatch Logs for centralized monitoring and alerting
• AWS Systems Manager: use Session Manager for secure shell access without opening SSH ports, and Patch Manager for OS-level updates
• AWS Certificate Manager: provision and manage TLS certificates for HTTPS termination at an ALB

## Deployment Quickstart

1. Launch the AMI on an m5.large or larger instance

2. Open port 80 in your security group (and port 22 for SSH access)

3. Browse to http://your-instance-ip/ for the Ruby demo app and http://your-instance-ip/node for the Node.js demo app

4. SSH in and run sudo passenger-status to see the live application process groups

5. Deploy your own Ruby/Rack, Node.js or Python app under /opt/passenger-demo, point the nginx vhost at it with passenger_enabled on, and reload nginx

## Use Cases

• Polyglot web application hosting: serve Ruby, Node.js and Python web apps from one supervised application server, behind an Application Load Balancer with auto-scaling groups
• Rails and Rack application deployment: run production Ruby web applications with worker process management, automatic restart, and zero-downtime deploys
• Lift and shift of on-premises Passenger workloads: migrate existing Passenger-hosted applications to EC2 without re-architecting, using the same nginx integration your team already knows
• Development and staging environments: spin up isolated application server instances for developers or QA teams with no shared state

## About cloudimg

cloudimg publishes and maintains production-ready application server images across AWS and Azure Marketplace, with ongoing security patches and version updates backed by 24/7 engineering support.

## Get Started

Subscribe to this listing and launch your first instance. For a guided deployment consultation or help planning your application architecture, contact the cloudimg support team.

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