I Can't Get Ruby on Rails + Passenger + Apache to Work

Question

I'm sorry if this is a stupid question, but I can't get Ruby on Rails to work on my Apache server. I'm using Phusion Passenger (mod_rails, mod_rack) for app deployment. Here is my RoR-specific configuration code in my website's Apache configuration file:

Alias /rails /var/www/syyborg.com/ruby/blog/public
<Directory /var/www/syyborg.com/ruby/blog/public>
     Options FollowSymLinks
     AllowOverride None
     Order Allow,Deny
     Allow from All
</Directory>
RailsBaseURI /rails

Again, I really have very little knowledge of this kind of thing; I have never set up a server from scratch before. Anyways, my rails app, as you can see, is located at /var/www/syyborg.com/ruby/blog/. I am trying to access it from http://[my domain, syyborg.com]/rails. However, when I try to load the site, I get a "403 Forbidden" error. Any help would be greatly appreciated, and I can provide further details if they are required. Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

If mod_rails is properly installed & loaded, the only configuration you need in apache is to point the document root to the public folder. mod_rails is smart enough to realize where the rest comes from. in apache: the <Directory> statement refers to the physical file location rather than the perceived path. This should also be your public folder for your rails app.

i.e.

<Directory /var/www/syyborg.com/ruby/blog/public>
     Options FollowSymLinks
     AllowOverride None
     Order Allow,Deny
     Allow from All
</Directory>

and your RailsBaseURI should be the path you're looking to use.

i.e.

RailsBaseURI "/rails"

Your alias statement looks fine.

Answer 2

Passenger uses some filesystem magic to find the actual Rails apps. All its actions are based of the DocumentRoot of your virtual host.

Basically, passenger needs two configuration settings set:

1. It needs to know which URL path should be a rails app. This is done by setting the RailsBaseURI value in your Apache config.
2. It needs to know where the Rails application is located in the filesystem. Here it uses a rather special approach. Namely a symlink pointing to the public directory of your rails app (not the RAILS_ROOT). This symlink needs to be inside the DOCUMENT_ROOT directory.

So assuming your DocumentRoot is /srv/www, you need to create the following symlink:

ln -s /var/www/syyborg.com/ruby/blog/public /srv/www/rails

Note that it is considered good practice to NOT put your rails app inside the DOCUMENT_ROOT. Also, Passenger does not support the VirtualDocumentRoot module currently.

For more information, refer to the respective section of the Passenger documentation.

Answer 3

It sounds like mod_rails is not installed. Assuming that you have this:

gem install passenger

and

passenger-install-apache2-module

Try to see if you can start passenger by itself like this:

cd /path/to/your/webapp
passenger start