Ruby on Rails: permission denied when using “rails generate controller welcome”

Question

I used Ruby on Rails on Red Hat server. When I trying to generate a controller file, I got this error:

[ec2-user@ip-172-31-22-128 testApp4]$ rails generate controller welcome
/home/ec2-user/.rvm/gems/ruby-2.1.2/gems/spring-1.1.3/lib/spring/server.rb:22:in `initialize': Permission denied @ rb_sysopen - /tmp/spring/fea371aaf9d69cfa58bd12f69b3f1bf6.pid (Errno::EACCES)
from /home/ec2-user/.rvm/gems/ruby-2.1.2/gems/spring-1.1.3/lib/spring/server.rb:22:in `open'
from /home/ec2-user/.rvm/gems/ruby-2.1.2/gems/spring-1.1.3/lib/spring/server.rb:22:in `open'
from /home/ec2-user/.rvm/gems/ruby-2.1.2/gems/spring-1.1.3/lib/spring/server.rb:22:in `initialize'
from /home/ec2-user/.rvm/gems/ruby-2.1.2/gems/spring-1.1.3/lib/spring/server.rb:14:in `new'
from /home/ec2-user/.rvm/gems/ruby-2.1.2/gems/spring-1.1.3/lib/spring/server.rb:14:in `boot'
from /home/ec2-user/.rvm/gems/ruby-2.1.2/gems/spring-1.1.3/lib/spring/client/run.rb:43:in `block in boot_server'
from /home/ec2-user/.rvm/gems/ruby-2.1.2/gems/spring-1.1.3/lib/spring/client/run.rb:41:in `fork'
from /home/ec2-user/.rvm/gems/ruby-2.1.2/gems/spring-1.1.3/lib/spring/client/run.rb:41:in `boot_server'
from /home/ec2-user/.rvm/gems/ruby-2.1.2/gems/spring-1.1.3/lib/spring/client/run.rb:24:in `call'
from /home/ec2-user/.rvm/gems/ruby-2.1.2/gems/spring-1.1.3/lib/spring/client/command.rb:7:in `call'
from /home/ec2-user/.rvm/gems/ruby-2.1.2/gems/spring-1.1.3/lib/spring/client/rails.rb:23:in `call'
from /home/ec2-user/.rvm/gems/ruby-2.1.2/gems/spring-1.1.3/lib/spring/client/command.rb:7:in `call'
from /home/ec2-user/.rvm/gems/ruby-2.1.2/gems/spring-1.1.3/lib/spring/client.rb:26:in `run'
from /home/ec2-user/.rvm/gems/ruby-2.1.2/gems/spring-1.1.3/bin/spring:48:in `<top (required)>'
from /home/ec2-user/.rvm/gems/ruby-2.1.2/gems/spring-1.1.3/lib/spring/binstub.rb:11:in `load'
from /home/ec2-user/.rvm/gems/ruby-2.1.2/gems/spring-1.1.3/lib/spring/binstub.rb:11:in `<top (required)>'
from /home/ec2-user/testApp4/bin/spring:16:in `require'
from /home/ec2-user/testApp4/bin/spring:16:in `<top (required)>'
from bin/rails:3:in `load'
from bin/rails:3:in `<main>'

Answer 1

I solved that problem by running

sudo chmod -R 1777 /tmp

hope this helps other people like me who would prefer not having to deactivate the spring gem

Answer 2

It needs ownership to write the re-write the pid for each server start.

I had to run it with my full local path & sudo

$ sudo chmod -R 777 /Users/MyName/Desktop/projects/my_project/tmp/

Answer 3

I took a look at the library that's trying to write the pid file, lib/spring/env.rb .

The function in question tries to create a temporary directory at the same location each time unless the XDG_RUNTIME_DIR is set:

path = Pathname.new(File.join(ENV['XDG_RUNTIME_DIR'] || Dir.tmpdir, "spring"))

Setting said variable to a unique directory does the trick for me:

export XDG_RUNTIME_DIR=/tmp/`whoami`

Answer 4

Missing permission for tmp folder to writable . run chmod 777 tmp/

Answer 5

I had this same issue when working on a Rails 6 application in Ubuntu 20.04.

Each time I run the command rails assets:clobber to remove the old assets in public/assets completely, I get the error:

errno::enotempty: directory not empty @ dir_s_rmdir

errno::eacces: permission denied @ apply2files

And the logs pointed the path to the file causing it, which in my a case was the public/packs/manifest.json file.

I tried deleting it or changing permission but nothing worked. I also tried deleting the tmp directory in the project, but it did not work.

Here's how I fixed it :

I listed all the files and directories in that directory using the ls -lh command, which gave me this output:

-rw-rw-r-- 1 promisechukwuenyem promisechukwuenyem 1.7K Oct  6 20:29 404.html
-rw-rw-r-- 1 promisechukwuenyem promisechukwuenyem 1.7K Oct  6 20:29 422.html
-rw-rw-r-- 1 promisechukwuenyem promisechukwuenyem 1.6K Oct  6 20:29 500.html
-rw-rw-r-- 1 promisechukwuenyem promisechukwuenyem    0 Oct  6 20:29 apple-touch-icon.png
-rw-rw-r-- 1 promisechukwuenyem promisechukwuenyem    0 Oct  6 20:29 apple-touch-icon-precomposed.png
drwxr-xr-x 3 promisechukwuenyem promisechukwuenyem 4.0K Oct 13 09:20 armstrong_tools
-rw-rw-r-- 1 promisechukwuenyem promisechukwuenyem    0 Oct  6 20:29 favicon.ico
drwxr-xr-x 3 root               root               4.0K Oct  8 13:06 packs
-rw-rw-r-- 1 promisechukwuenyem promisechukwuenyem   99 Oct  6 20:29 robots.txt

I realized that the permissions for the files and directories were fine, however, the packs directory had root ownership which was seperate from persmission of other files and directories:

drwxr-xr-x 3 root               root               4.0K Oct  8 13:06 packs

I simply ran the command below to change the ownership from root to promisechukwuenyem:

sudo chown -R promisechukwuenyem:promisechukwuenyem packs/

Now when I ran the command rails assets:clobber to remove the old assets in public/assets completely, it worked just fine.

That's all.

I hope this helps

Answer 6

I am getting this type of error(permission denied @ apply2files) when using rails server .

sudo rails server solve my problem.

Answer 7

Or,

export XDG_RUNTIME_DIR=/run/user/${id -u}

to change this system variable. id -u returns your UID(user id), which is the dir name where you have access to write/read under /run/user/ .