Nginx and Unicorn - (Connection refused) while connecting to upstream

Question

Trying to deploy my first rails app on a vps. I have followed the instructions in the following setup.

https://www.digitalocean.com/community/articles/how-to-1-click-install-ruby-on-rails-on-ubuntu-12-10-with-digitalocean

But my site gets a 504 Gateway Time-out.

In the nginx log I get the following:

2013/10/16 03:10:45 [error] 19627#0: *82 connect() failed (111: Connection refused) while connecting to upstream, client: 121.218.167.90, server: _, request: "GET / HTTP/1.1", upstream: "http://162.243.39.196:8080/", host: "162.243.39.196"

And when I try to run unicorn I get the following

E, [2013-10-16T04:26:28.530019 #30087] ERROR -- : adding listener failed addr=0.0.0.0:8080 (in use)

My nginx default file has the following

server {
        listen   80;
        root /home/rails/public;
        server_name _;
        index index.htm index.html;

        location / {
                try_files $uri/index.html $uri.html $uri @app;
        }

        location ~* ^.+\.(jpg|jpeg|gif|png|ico|css|zip|tgz|gz|rar|bz2|doc|xls|exe|pdf|ppt|txt|tar|mid|midi|wav|bmp|rtf|js|mp3|flv|mpeg|avi)$ {
                        try_files $uri @app;
                }

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

}

My /home/unicorn/unicorn.conf has

listen "127.0.0.1:8080"
worker_processes 2
user "rails"
working_directory "/home/rails"
pid "/home/unicorn/pids/unicorn.pid"
stderr_path "/home/unicorn/log/unicorn.log"
stdout_path "/home/unicorn/log/unicorn.log"

Thanks for your help.

Answer 1

You are missing an upstream block where you refer to in proxy_pass http://app_server; . You can put it above the server block like this.

upstream app_server {
    server 127.0.0.1:8080 fail_timeout=0;
}

server {
    listen   80;
    root /home/rails/public;
    server_name _;
    index index.htm index.html;
    ...