Rails project: routes give 500 errors in production but work in development

Question

I'm having some trouble getting my rails app to run in production. As I've coded rails before but haven't deployed much it's probably something in my configs and/or deployment process.

Everything runs fine locally in development. All tests pass, I can see the routes and access them at localhost. When in production (rails 4, nginx, unicorn on CentOS) I'm getting 500 errors on the very same routes.

When I rake routes on the server I see all the same routes as when in development. Rake routes on the server returns (shortened from the full list of routes):

          Prefix Verb   URI Pattern                           Controller#Action
       companies GET    /companies(.:format)                  companies#index
                 POST   /companies(.:format)                  companies#create
     new_company GET    /companies/new(.:format)              companies#new
    edit_company GET    /companies/:id/edit(.:format)         companies#edit
         company GET    /companies/:id(.:format)              companies#show
                 PATCH  /companies/:id(.:format)              companies#update
                 PUT    /companies/:id(.:format)              companies#update
                 DELETE /companies/:id(.:format)              companies#destroy

Which as you can probably guess comes from resources :companies

But http://sortinghat.foo.com/companies gives me the rails 500 page on production (foo is obviously not the domain but I've just replaced the real domain).

I am at a loss having searched on here and the web for ideas, having read lots of "how to deploy rails" blog posts, and have looked at lots of config files (you'll see these are ones I copied from elsewhere but it all seems pretty standard). I'm probably missing something obvious. I'm not seeing any issues in the logs.

The only clue I have is that I don't have an /etc/nginx/sites-enabled directory and it looks like capistrano wants one, but I didn't see any errors during cap deploy (except the cleanup one I note at the bottom). In this case it's the only site being run so I don't need a virtual host and didn't think I needed it so wasn't concerned.

Thanks in advance for any help.

Here's my nginx.config

# Taken from http://www.sitepoint.com/deploying-your-rails-app-to-the-cloud-with-unicorn-nginx-and-capistrano/

upstream unicorn {
  server unix:/tmp/unicorn.sortinghat.sock fail_timeout=0;
}

server {
    listen 80 default deferred;
    server_name sortinghat;
    if ($host = 'sortinghat' ) {
        rewrite ^/(.*)$ http://sortinghat.foo.com/$1 permanent;
    }
  root /var/www/sortinghat/current/public;

  location ^~ /assets/ {
    gzip_static on;
    expires max;
    add_header Cache-Control public;
  }

  try_files $uri/index.html $uri @unicorn;

  location @unicorn {
    proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
    proxy_set_header Host $http_host;
    proxy_redirect off;
    proxy_pass http://unicorn;
  }

  error_page 500 502 503 504 /500.html;
  client_max_body_size 4G;
  keepalive_timeout 10;
}

My unicorn.rb

# Taken from http://www.sitepoint.com/deploying-your-rails-app-to-the-cloud-with-unicorn-nginx-and-capistrano/

# Define your root directory
root = "/var/www/sortinghat/current"

# Define worker directory for Unicorn
working_directory root

# Location of PID file
pid "#{root}/tmp/pids/unicorn.pid"

# Define Log paths
stderr_path "#{root}/log/unicorn.log"
stdout_path "#{root}/log/unicorn.log"

# Listen on a UNIX data socket
listen "/tmp/unicorn.sortinghat.sock"

# 16 worker processes for production environment
worker_processes 16

# Load rails before forking workers for better worker spawn time
preload_app true

# Restart workes hangin' out for more than 240 secs
timeout 240

And my deploy.rb (Note: I made some things world readable with the chmod 777 as a quick hack. I'm just trying to get this running internally to run a test all behind a firewall. I can probably take those out but I doubt they're hurting anything right now.)

require 'capistrano/ext/multistage'

set :application, "sortinghat"

# Need to use gnutar since that is what the server uses
# see https://coderwall.com/p/ypwmpg
set :copy_local_tar, "/usr/bin/gnutar" if `uname` =~ /Darwin/

# remove old releases
set :keep_releases, 3


# Source Control
# You can set :scm explicitly or Capistrano will make an intelligent guess based on known version control directory names
# Or: `accurev`, `bzr`, `cvs`, `darcs`, `git`, `mercurial`, `perforce`, `subversion` or `none`
set :repository,  "git@github.com:me/project.git"  # changed here but correct in the actual file
set :scm, :git
set :branch, "master"
set :deploy_via, :copy


# Deployment
# Default deployment directory is /u/apps/#{application}” (where #{application} but alternate can be set
# set :deploy_to, "/var/www"
set :user, "mherschberg"
default_run_options[:pty] = true
set :use_sudo, false
set :ssh_options, {:forward_agent => true}


role :web, "sortinghat.foo.com"                          # Your HTTP server, Apache/etc
role :app, "sortinghat.foo.com"                          # This may be the same as your `Web` server
role :db,  "lin-db3.foo.com", :primary => true #,  :no_release => true          # This is where Rails migrations will run
#role :db,  "your slave db-server here" # no slave for test

set :rails_env, "production"

set :stages, ["staging", "production"]
set :default_stage, "staging"

# if you want to clean up old releases on each deploy uncomment this:
after "deploy:restart", "deploy:cleanup"


namespace :deploy do
  %w[start stop restart].each do |command|
    desc "#{command} unicorn server"
    task command, roles: :app, except: {no_release: true} do
      sudo "chmod 777 /var/www/sortinghat/current/config/unicorn_ini.sh"
      run "/etc/init.d/unicorn_#{application} #{command}" # Using unicorn as the app server
    end
  end

  task :setup_config, roles: :app do
    sudo "ln -nfs #{current_path}/config/nginx.conf /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/#{application}"
    sudo "ln -nfs #{current_path}/config/unicorn_ini.sh /etc/init.d/unicorn_#{application}"
    sudo "chmod 777 #{current_path}/config/unicorn_ini.sh"
    sudo "chmod 777 /var/www/sortinghat/current/config/unicorn_ini.sh"
    run "mkdir -p #{shared_path}/config"
    put File.read("config/database.yml"), "#{shared_path}/config/database.yml"
    puts "Now edit the config files in #{shared_path}."
  end
  after "deploy:setup", "deploy:setup_config"

  task :symlink_config, roles: :app do
    run "ln -nfs #{shared_path}/config/database.yml #{release_path}/config/database.yml"
  end
  after "deploy:finalize_update", "deploy:symlink_config"

  desc "Make sure local git is in sync with remote."
  task :check_revision, roles: :web do
    unless `git rev-parse HEAD` == `git rev-parse origin/master`
      puts "WARNING: HEAD is not the same as origin/master"
      puts "Run `git push` to sync changes."
      exit
    end
  end
  before "deploy", "deploy:check_revision"
end


# if you're still using the script/reaper helper you will need
# these http://github.com/rails/irs_process_scripts

# If you are using Passenger mod_rails uncomment this:
# namespace :deploy do
#   task :start do ; end
#   task :stop do ; end
#   task :restart, :roles => :app, :except => { :no_release => true } do
#     run "#{try_sudo} touch #{File.join(current_path,'tmp','restart.txt')}"
#   end
# end

cap deploy works with only one error, but it's just a problem with permissions cleaning up old releases. ( cap deploy:cold ran fine)

  ** [out :: sortinghat.foo.com] rm: cannot remove `/var/www/sortinghat/releases/20130917180205/thout-curl-include=dir/include/build_info': Permission denied

Answer 1

The answer from a friend was: use passenger, not unicorn. It pretty much worked out of the box.

You can find it at https://www.phusionpassenger.com/

(I did have some strange issue which I got error 128 from github. Nothing had changed in my deploy.rb except to uncomment the commented out lined at the bottom for passenger; certainly nothing changed in my github account or AFAIK locally. I'm not sure what happened but I deleted my github key for this machine, created a new one and then everything worked.)