Excuse me if my question may seem inappropriate but i was unable to find any information regarding my question.

I am currently choosing a production web server for my rails app, Passenger seems to fit my needs perfectly, although there is a small question that popped in my head.

It seems that Passenger is already based on Nginx core, but I see there is also a version passenger-nginx. What's the difference between them if they are both based on Nginx?

Thank you in advance.

Passenger standalone is good enough to run in production, it may be easier to use the OS packages instead

• Installation is usually as simple as yum install or apt-get install
• Usually includes all the appropriate startup scripts like /etc/init.d/nginx
• You don't have to write scripts to make sure it starts up after rebooting. Ubuntu will automatically set that up, and on CentOS/RedHat, it's just a one-time call to chkconfig
• Opening ports 80 and 443 usually requires root, but your app should execute as your regular unprivileged user. The OS packages handle this automatically.
• Running a shared copy of nginx means you can run multiple sites/apps from the same server, by different users, if needed.

It seems that Passenger is already based on Nginx core but i see there are also a version passenger-nginx. What's the difference between them if they are both based on Nginx?

There is almost no difference. Passenger standalone just automates setting up nginx (if you don't already have it) and passenger-nginx. Passenger standalone typically starts as your regular unprivileged user on port 3000 or another a high port number, and nginx typically starts as root using ports 80 and 443.