phusion passenger (3.0.17) + nginx with parallels plesk 11

Question

I am planning to buy an Linux dedicated server for ruby on rails hosting, it uses plesk 11 for server administration.

As I read the release notes of plesk 11 http://download1.parallels.com/Plesk/PP11/11.0/release-notes/parallels-plesk-panel-11.0-for-linux-based-os.html, it uses nginx (1.3) for plesk server administration.

What my question is, I am using ruby on rails application going to run on phusion passenger with nginx module , whether passenger nginx and plesk nginx will conflict or setting up plesk 11 with phussion passenger nginx module is feasible or not.

Have anyone experienced with above scenario, please share your thoughts, opinions, workarounds and reviews.

Answer 1

Though I've never tried it personally, but my understanding is that Phusion Passenger and Plesk Nginx are likely to conflict. Nginx in Plesk is set up as a reverse proxy and Phusion Passenger would need Nginx as an actual web server. It has been announced a couple of times, that Plesk will support Nginx as actual web server, but it is not available yet.

I can see two options here

1. Either to try Phusion Passenger for Apache and install it together with Apache in Plesk
2. Or try Phusion Passenger for Nginx w/o Plesk Nginx. This way you actually are going to have 2 independent web servers on one machine - your own Nginx and Plesk Apache. You will need to put them on different ports and Plesk would know nothing about your Nginx. I don't see much sense in this configuration - Plesk will be completely useless here.