Why is apache/passenger unable to open the sqlite3 rails database file?

Question

I'm running apache2/passenger2.0.3 (ubuntu 9.10 packages).

I can start up Webrick in the rails folder and run the app perfectly as I do on my development box with

script/server

Why then does apache/passenger fail to open the database, throwing a 500 and putting the following in the log?

Status: 500 Internal Server Error could not open database: unable to open database file /usr/lib/ruby/1.8/sqlite3/errors.rb:62:in `check'...

Answer 1

I didn't set the RailsEnv to development in the apache conf, as this is how I intended to run it. There was no production database to open!