Perl not working with Nginx via fastcgi, cannot decipher error logs

Question

Im running CentOS 6.2, Nginx 1.2.3 following these Linode Instructions to get Perl to work with Nginx I've done everything upto the point of testing an actual Perl file. When I do this the browser says:

The page you are looking for is temporarily unavailable.
Please try again later. 

And my Nginx error-log shows the following:

2012/09/02 22:09:58 [error] 20772#0: *1 connect() failed (111: Connection refused) while connecting to upstream, client: 192.168.1.102, server: localhost, request: "GET / HTTP/1.1", upstream: "fastcgi://127.0.0.1:8999", host: "192.168.1.10:81"

Im stuck at this point. Im not sure if it matters but I also have spawn-fcgi and php-fpm to serve up PHP files on this site, but that should be 100% seperate from the perl-fastcgi setup, different port, etc..

How can I troubleshoot this?

Answer 1

upstream: "fastcgi://127.0.0.1:8999"

returned the error

(111: Connection refused)

This means that nothing is actually listening on that port.

The most likely cause is that you didn't actually start the perl-fastcgi service.

/etc/rc.d/init.d/perl-fastcgi start

Answer 2

Can you reach the fastcgi daemon via its public IP adress? At the moment you gave the localhost address in the nginx config, maybe it only listens on the public network interface.

Answer 3

I believe the answer was a socket permission issue.

In my fastcgi-wrapper.pl there were the following two lines:

sub main {
    #$socket = FCGI::OpenSocket( "127.0.0.1:8999", 10 ); #use IP sockets
    $socket = FCGI::OpenSocket( "/var/run/nginx/perl_cgi-dispatch.sock", 10 ); #use UNIX sockets - user running this script must have w access to the 'nginx' folder!!
    $request = FCGI::Request( \*STDIN, \*STDOUT, \*STDERR, \%req_params, $socket );
    if ($request) { request_loop()};
        FCGI::CloseSocket( $socket );
}

When I uncomment the TCPIP socket and comment the Unix Socket line the script works. I beleive this is because my NGINX user did not have the correct permissions to use /var/run/nginx/perl_cgi-dispatch.sock

I thought root was running nginx, but maybe it's not, Im not sure of that yet.

================================================

EDIT: The root user did have access to the socket, however my nginx configuration file was not pointing to the socket as @nickgrim mentioned below. I changed the site.conf to the following and the socket correctly ran the perl script (I also changed the fastcgi_wrapper.pl to use the socket again instead of the TCPIP):

location ~ \.pl|cgi$ {
        try_files $uri =404;
        gzip off;
        include /etc/nginx/fastcgi_params;
        #fastcgi_pass  127.0.0.1:8999;
        fastcgi_pass unix:/var/run/nginx/perl_cgi-dispatch.sock;
        fastcgi_index index.pl;
        fastcgi_param  SCRIPT_FILENAME  /srv/www/test1/$fastcgi_script_name;
    }