Is Passenger Deprecated for Nginx versions above 1.14?

I updated nginx from version 1.14 to 1.18 (Ubuntu) on Ubuntu 18.04.

Doing so appeared to break passenger. So I uninstalled and attempted to reinstall the Open Source Passenger version via the Passenger installation Ubuntu 18.04 instructions.

I got to this line:

sudo apt-get install -y libnginx-mod-http-passenger

Which throws this error

libnginx-mod-http-passenger : Depends: nginx-common (< 1.14.1) but 1.18.0-3ubuntu1+bionic1 is to be installed

Update I also attempted with the enterprise version. Following the enterprise version installation instructions, I received a similar error message:

libnginx-mod-http-passenger-enterprise : Depends: nginx-common (< 1.14.1) but 1.18.0-3ubuntu1+bionic1 is to be installed

I did attempt to research the issue and I found this issue on Phusion's GitHub as well as this more recent issue. It appears that what most people are doing is rolling back their nginx version to 1.14.

You did not specify which method you used to install nginx 1.14 + passenger. At any rate, it does appear that, for Ubuntu 18.04, you cannot get nginx 1.18 + passenger.

So you might try upgrading Ubuntu, or rolling back nginx as you say. Passenger is not recommended for security reasons, but you could still have the version you are referring to, see this.

Note that as stated here "In July 2017, the Ubuntu 17.04 Zesty packages for Passenger were changed from a static to a dynamic module package." Perhaps you can try compiling from source, in a way that the dynamic module is loaded. YMMV.

Related:

1. https://github.com/phusion/passenger/issues/2263
2. https://github.com/phusion/passenger/issues/2291

The error message you got says that it's impossible to install passenger because it depends on nginx-common < 1.14.1.

To fix this, the first thing you have to do is check if your system still knows the previous version of Nginx:

apt show nginx -a | egrep "^(Package|Version|APT-Sources|$)"

The output will be something similar to this:

Package: nginx
Version: 1.14.0-0ubuntu1.9
APT-Sources: http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu bionic-updates/main amd64 Packages

Package: nginx
Version: 1.14.0-0ubuntu1
APT-Sources: http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu bionic/main amd64 Packages

And you will probably have version 1.18-<somethin>. To avoid version 1.18 to be installed, you have two options:

1. Remove the repository you've added to be able to update nginx. Either using sudo apt-add-repository --remove <repository> or going through sources at /etc/apt/sources.list and /etc/apt/sources.list.d and commenting out or removing the said repository.

2. Blocking nginx to upgrade to versions different from 1.14:

sudo apt-get install nginx=1.14.0-0ubuntu1 nginx-common=1.14.0-0ubuntu1
sudo apt-mark hold nginx nginx-common

After that, you shall be able to reinstall libnginx-mod-http-passenger.