directory index of "..." is forbidden - ruby-on-rails

Question

I am trying to get phusion passenger and nginx running on Mac OSX. It has been very difficult.
I followed the instructions here exactly.
$ brew install nginx --with-passenger
$ brew info nginx --with-passenger
Then it tells me this:
To activate Phusion Passenger, add this to
/usr/local/etc/nginx/nginx.conf, inside the 'http' context:
passenger_root /usr/local/opt/passenger/libexec/src/ruby_supportlib/phusion_passenger/locations.ini;
passenger_ruby /usr/bin/ruby;
What's interesting about that is that is not the ruby my site uses. I use rvm and have generated a .versions.conf file:
rvm --create --versions-conf use ruby-2.1.2#core
Hence, when you cd to my root folder of site, you get the following:
$ rvm-prompt
ruby-2.1.2#core
So that is what I added to nginx.conf:
http {
...
passenger_root /usr/local/opt/passenger/libexec/src/ruby_supportlib/phusion_passenger/locations.ini;
passenger_ruby /Users/dviglione/.rvm/gems/ruby-2.1.2#core/wrappers/ruby;
Note that when I run passenger-config, it does give me a different location for locations.ini:
$ /usr/local/bin/passenger-config --root
/usr/local/Cellar/passenger/5.0.26/libexec/src/ruby_supportlib/phusion_passenger/locations.ini
I don't know which location is correct but I stuck with the one that it provided during the install. If I changed to the other location, I get a different issue: "This site can't be reached".
In nginx.conf, my server block looks like this:
server {
rack_env development;
listen 8080;
server_name mysite_development;
root /Users/myuser/projects/core;
access_log /Users/myuser/projects/core/log/nginx_access.log;
error_log /Users/myuser/projects/core/log/nginx_error.log;
passenger_enabled on;
}
I added the following to /etc/hosts:
127.0.0.1 mysite_development
255.255.255.255 broadcasthost
::1 localhost
fe80::1%lo0 localhost
The root directory has the following permissions:
$ ls -ld core
drwxr-xr-x 37 myuser CORP\Domain Users 1258 Oct 14 18:45 core
Yet, when I navigate to http://mysite_development:8080/, I get the following error in my nginx error log:
2016/10/14 18:52:23 [error] 90766#0: *1 directory index of
"/Users/myuser/projects/core/" is forbidden, client: 127.0.0.1,
server: mysite_development, request: "GET / HTTP/1.1", host:
"mysite_development:8080"
The problem is not with nginx itself because I created a test folder and put an index.html in there and then created a server block for that and the index.html successfully displayed in browser. So problem is either with Passenger or Rails.
Note if I add this to the server block:
location / {
root html;
index index.html index.htm;
}
Then I just get the 'Welcome to nginx!' page.
I even chmod 777 recursively on the entire directory and its files of the Rails app. Still get the 403 Forbidden error. It has to be a problem with Passenger.
How can I resolve this?

Answer 1

You need to explicitly specify, where actual Ruby code of a Rails application is located, using passenger_app_root directive, described in Passenger's documentaion.
More details in my full answer.