Nginx – Starting Rails App with Phusion Passenger Standalone

nginxphusion-passengerrubyruby-on-railsweb-server

I am deploying a Rails application ( Project Fedena ) to a VPS at Digital Ocean.
I can use either of mongrel_rails start and ruby script/server to launch my app with no problem. It binds to port :3000 and I can use the application as desired.

The problem is with Phusion Passenger, I have installed the gem gem install passenger however, when I run passenger start from my rails app root, there's a permissions issue, which doesn't seem to be the case with Mongrel or Webrick:

=============== Phusion Passenger Standalone web server started ===============
PID file: /root/fedena/tmp/pids/passenger.80.pid
Log file: /root/fedena/log/passenger.80.log
Environment: production
Accessible via: http://0.0.0.0:3000/

You can stop Phusion Passenger Standalone by pressing Ctrl-C.
Problems? Check https://www.phusionpassenger.com/documentation/Users%20guide%20Standalone.html#troubleshooting
===============================================================================
2015/03/08 01:35:03 [error] 18827#0: *4 directory index of "/root/fedena/public/" is forbidden, client: 127.0.0.1, server: _, request: "HEAD / HTTP/1.1", host: "0.0.0.0"

There is only one user (0) on this machine that owns all the directories. I've performed a recursive chmod on the directory to 777, 775, 755.

Best Answer

My problem turned out to be the passenger gem passenger (5.0.2) released just yesterday (March 7, 2015). This explains why I couldn't find anyone with my specific problem.

I solved this and successfully launched my rails application by uninstalling version 5.0.2 and installing version 4.0.59 (the last stable version from the 4.* branch):

gem uninstall passenger -Iax
gem install --no-ri --no-rdoc --verbose passenger -v 4.0.59

Bug report filed. I hope this helps :)

Related Solutions

Rails app (Redmine) on Phusion Passenger

I got the same error, and this http://randomthoughtsgr.wordpress.com/2011/10/17/redmine-sub-uri-and-apache-configuration/ helped me to resolve it!

While trying to setup Redmine in a sub-uri I run across an issue will trying to setup apache. Passenger would display the following error: No such file or directory – config/environment.rb while trying to access the Redmine webpage.

After trying a few suggestions on the issue I managed to get Redmine to work with the following configuration:

The passenger.load configuration file was the following (the paths will probably vary depending on the installation):
LoadModule passenger_module /opt/ruby-enterprise-1.8.7-2011.03/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/passenger-3.0.9/ext/apache2/mod_passenger.so
PassengerRoot /opt/ruby-enterprise-1.8.7-2011.03/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/passenger-3.0.9
PassengerRuby /opt/ruby-enterprise-1.8.7-2011.03/bin/ruby
PassengerDefaultUser www-data
In the Virtual Host configuration I added the following:
PassengerAppRoot /usr/local/lib/redmine-1.2/
RailsBaseURI /redmine
RailsEnv production
PassengerAppRoot represents the path that redmine is installed.
RailsBasedURI represents the sub directory in the URL that represents Redmine eg. http://www.example.org/redmine

(for this to work is also essential to have a symbolic link of the redmine-./public inside the web root folder).

Also I changed ownership of the redmine-1.2 folder and the symlink redmine folder to the apache user/group (I am under the impression that it was necessary).

Nginx Permission denied error

nginx runs as nginxuser as your configuration states. You say your directories are owned by root:root.

Ensure that each and every directory from the root to the file attempting to be accessed by nginx has the right execution (and maybe reading?) permission. In your case, the other permission group (chmod o+(r)x <recursive list of dirs>).

If that is not enough, try to add the reading permission for others on socket files.

Normally now nginx will be able to stat() those files.

The fact that everything runs fine with nginx root being set to /usr/share/nginx/html is that those files have been created by the nginx package with an adequate mix of user/group/permissions...

Now, I see another (and bigger) problem: you try to work with nginx workers running as nginx:nginx and files owned by root:root, for which there is no write permission for nginx whatsoever. Any attempt by nginx to write on a socket will thus ultimately fail...

You should really rethink the whole construction of yours. Make nginx user/group and directories/files ones match in some way so nginx can open what it need to open (execution right on directories), read what it needs to read and write what it needs to write without relying on the other permission group which basically allows any user to do the same.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Rails app (Redmine) on Phusion Passenger

Nginx Permission denied error

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