Why is my Rails app not loading using Passenger 3, RVM and Rails 3.1?

Question

I am having difficulties with Passenger 3, Apache, RVM and a Rails 3.1 application on Ubuntu. For some reason, the Rails app is not loading, however I have run basically the same configuration before and had no problem.

I have Ruby 1.9.2 installed in RVM and Passenger installed with all gems in default.

I put the following in the apache.conf file:

LoadModule passenger_module /usr/local/rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.2-p290/gems/passenger-3.0.11/ext/apache2/mod_passenger.so
PassengerRoot /usr/local/rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.2-p290/gems/passenger-3.0.11
PassengerRuby /usr/local/rvm/wrappers/ruby-1.9.2-p290/ruby

This is my virtual hosts configuration:

<VirtualHost *:80>
  ServerName server
  DocumentRoot /root/www/tester/public
  <Directory /root/www/tester/public>
    Allow from all
    Options -MultiViews
  </Directory>
</VirtualHost>

Passenger appears to be loading, as the Apache log shows:

[Wed Jan 11 23:18:28 2012] [notice] Apache/2.2.20 (Ubuntu) Phusion_Passenger/3.0.11 configured -- resuming normal operations

but, I cannot get the application to load at all.

If I run Passenger standalone I get the following error:

2012/01/11 23:03:31 [error] 13427#0: *4 "/root/www/sound/public/index.html" is forbidden (13: Permission denied), client: 127.0.0.1, server: _, request: "HEAD / HTTP/1.1", host: "0.0.0.0"

I changed all the permissions to 755 and gave ownership to apache (www-data) but to no avail.

Finally, when I run passenger-status, I get:

----------- General information -----------
  max      = 6
  count    = 0
  active   = 0
  inactive = 0
 Waiting on global queue: 0

----------- Application groups -----------

But, as you can see, there is no application loaded.

Answer 1

FIXED! - I needed to delete the default virtual hosts file in sites-enabled directory!

Answer 2

My guess is you're looking in the right place, and its something to do with user permissions.

Number 1 rule for Passenger is;

• Passenger will run as the user which owns "config/environment.rb" (or "config.ru" for rack apps)

Also, I'd suggest, don't ever run as root.

/var/www or /var/rails are common places to put your rails apps

but I usually end up having a user for each app, and putting it in the home directory.

Namely, for my application I have;

1. the user myapp
2. the directory /home/myapp/deploy/
3. a symlink to the code at /home/myapp/deploy/current
4. all these directories are owned by myapp

My apache config is something like

<VirtualHost *:80>
  ServerName myapp.com
  DocumentRoot /home/myapp/deploy/current
</VirtualHost>

For me this makes the separation of ownership clear, and avoids any of these problems.

(notably, all tasks done via capistrano are done as the myapp user)