Error installing nginx with passenger on Debian 9

Question

I am in the process of upgrading a Debian installation to version 9 and I am facing problems getting nginx with passenger to run. The issue is with trying to install libnginx-mod-http-passenger, specifically, it seems to require a lower version of nginx than comes from the standard debian repositories:

# sudo apt-get install -y libnginx-mod-http-passenger
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
Some packages could not be installed. This may mean that you have
requested an impossible situation or if you are using the unstable
distribution that some required packages have not yet been created
or been moved out of Incoming.
The following information may help to resolve the situation:

The following packages have unmet dependencies:
 libnginx-mod-http-passenger : Depends: nginx-common (< 1.10.4) but 1.14.2-1~dotdeb+8.1 is to be installed
E: Unable to correct problems, you have held broken packages.

My passenger source list looks like this:

# cat /etc/apt/sources.list.d/passenger.list
deb https://oss-binaries.phusionpassenger.com/apt/passenger stretch main

I explicitly want to install from repos. So, how can I get past this issue?

Answer 1

I finally resolved this, although not exactly in a way that I wanted.

I removed and purged all nginx* and libnginx* packages and then explicitly installed version 1.10. Now libnginx-mod-http-passenger installed correctly and everything worked.

I still don't quite know why it was trying to install version 1.14.2-1~dotdeb+8.1, as I'm on Debian 9, not 8 - but now I have version 1.10.3-1+deb9u2.