Serving multiple Rails apps with passenger + Nginx on a single domain

Question

I have a single Nginx instance with passenger and would like to serve different Rails apps at different routes. Specifically: /api should serve one app and / should serve a different. My Rails apps are located at /srv/api/ and /srv/ui on the filesystem.

My Nginx config is currently like this:

user  foo;
worker_processes  1;

events { worker_connections  1024; }

http {
  passenger_root /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/passenger-4.0.49;
  passenger_ruby /home/monolith/.rvm/gems/ruby-2.1.1/wrappers/ruby;

  include       mime.types;
  default_type  application/octet-stream;

  sendfile        on;
  keepalive_timeout  65;

  server {
    listen       80;
    server_name  localhost;

    location / {
      root /srv/ui/public/;
      passenger_enabled on;
    }
    location /api {
      root /srv/api/public/;
      passenger_enabled on;
    }

    error_page   500 502 503 504  /50x.html;
      location = /50x.html {
      root   html;
    }
  }
}

With this config, the API app is being served correctly, but the UI app is not. It returns a 500 error, and there are no error logs in either Nginx or under logs in Rails.

Attempted solutions / debugging

1. echo 'test' > /srv/ui/public/index.html . This results in a successful render of 'test'
   when visiting <hostname>.com/

2. Changing location / to serve a static index.html using the alias directive instead. This works also.

I saw this solution of symlinking a file inside the / location https://www.chiliproject.org/boards/1/topics/545 , but this would be relevant if the API app was not being served.

I suspect this has something to do with interference among passenger instances, but I don't know what the solution is.

Answer 1

We've achieved this before (albeit with Apache - maybe we can work towards a port for Nginx):

#app/apache2/apache2.conf
<VirtualHost *:80>
   ServerName *********.co.uk

   DocumentRoot /apps/[main_app]/current/public
    <Directory /apps/[main_app]/current/public>
        Allow from all
        Options -MultiViews
    </Directory>

    ScriptAlias /cgi-bin/ /usr/lib/cgi-bin/
   <Directory "/usr/lib/cgi-bin">
      AllowOverride None
      Options +ExecCGI -MultiViews +SymLinksIfOwnerMatch
      Order allow,deny
      Allow from all
   </Directory>

   #Secondry App
   Alias /[app_name] /apps/[app_name]/current/public
   <Location /[app_name]>
      PassengerAppRoot /apps/[app_name]/current
      RackEnv production
      RackBaseURI /[app_name]
   </Location>
</VirtualHost>

In terms of Nginx, you may be able to get away with the following:

#etc/nginx/nginx.conf
http {
   server {
      listen 80;
      server_name  yourdomain.com;

     #serve your "main" site here
     root /srv/ui/public/;
     passenger_enabled on;

     #serve your "API" app from the location / Alias
     location /api {
         root /srv/api/public/;
         passenger_enabled on;
     }
   }
}