Ruby on Rails

On Monday, June 30, 2014 4:07:41 PM UTC-4, Liz Huang wrote:

 

Yes, server.app comes with Mavericks, so I use it to host Rails web apps and have tried to create
passenger.conf under other folder etc. I set up everything in snow leopard under directory "/etc/apache2",
and sites folder was also inside /etc/apache2, it is quite straightfoward and easy, but when I try
to do the samething with server.app under folder /Library/Server/Web/Config/apache2. I couldn't
make it work, the steps seem to be quite simple, but not easy to find out what might go wrong.

I used brew to install passenger.

The config file used for the web server in Mavericks Server is httpd_server_app.conf.  You may want to look in that file and make sure the line below exists and is not commented out.  It should be near the end of the file. 

Include /Library/Server/Web/Config/apache2/other/*.conf

I have never installed passenger with brew, only using ruby-gems either in the system ruby, or nowadays in RVM environments.  So, I'm not sure of any differences there may be installing it with brew, but I don't think there is any reason why it shouldn't work.

It can be tricky to find out exactly what is going wrong.   If you are still just getting the public directory listing when you load the site in your browser, then Passenger most likely has not been activated, which means there is some issue with your apache config.  If Passenger is loading and you don't have the PassengerRuby environment set up in your site config file properly, then you should get an error that Passenger can't start the web app.

If Passenger isn't loading at all, then check /var/log/apache2/error_log when you start your web server, and see what it says.  It should have some info about the startup process, and if Passenger is loading it should be mentioned.  If passenger is not mentioned, you can see if your passenger.conf file is getting loaded by changing the "LoadModule passenger_module" directive to have an incorrect path.  When I do that, apache silently fails to start (i.e. nothing in the access or error logs).  

Jim Crate