I'm having a hard time figuring out where I'm going wrong in trying to deploy a Rails app via nginx. Rails is accessible via site.com:3000 (after starting it with rails server), and site.com:80 displays the standard nginx "working, but further configuration required" page. I've spent a few hours trawling the documentation trying to figure our how to get my Rails app accessible at :80 rather than :3000, but to no avail.
I think it's most likely that I'm misunderstanding how nginx, Passenger, and Rails work together, and have therefore configured my nginx.conf incorrectly (one page I found implied that I shouldn't both be using nginx and running rails server). Any and all help is hugely appreciated.
Possibly relevant version numbers:
Rails 4.1.4
Ruby 2.1.2p95
CentOS 6.5
nginx 1.6.0
nginx.conf partial: http://pastebin.com/A3JD09pr
I'm new at this, so it turned out that a couple things were up:
I needed to put export rvmsudo_secure_path=1 in my .bashrc instead of just running it once, following up with source ~/.bashrc in the terminal. This allowed me to run "rvmsudo" commands to start on port 80 rather than the default 3000.
I had both nginx and Rails competing for port 80, so I had to stop nginx's static page server to allow that. Simple as nginx stop.
My head is about to explode from the mangled mess as a result of the following few days trying to setup a development environment for Rails, Apache and Passenger.
The questions I have are:
Do you NEED passenger for a development environment? Can I just develop with pow.cx instead? - I am 99.99% sure the answer is no (you don't use passenger for development), but I need confirmation since I am deeply confused now.
When I deploy, I only use Passenger for that, correct? I.e. I don't ever touch passenger until I deploy.
Is my development environment correct?
Production deployment is simply moving a rails application under the effects of Passenger coupled with an Apache VHOST?
Background (I suggest you read):
It seems that all the information on the web is concerned about explaining things for people who already know what they are doing, rather than explaining in detail how things work it's just a series of installation steps and that has left me extremely confused on the role of things, and how to setup a development environment and deploy a RoR application correctly - so please bear with this long question.
For the past 3 days I have been trying to setup a development environment on my Macbook Pro that isn't destroyed by Apple's rediculous limits on Apache installations. I installed a custom Apache install (from bitnami using their ruby stack, since I refuse to use Server.app) so that I can run Apache and upgrade things like PHP to 5.5 easily, and that works fine.
I am trying to get into RoR but so far it has been a struggle, and I am about ready to give up.
I understand you need Apache to serve Rails applications so that the server can handle requests concurrently rather than one at a time, and that various interfaces for this exist like Thin or whatever; Passenger was highly recommended.
I installed Passenger via their instructions and did some hackery to compile it for the Bitnami passenger installation, rather than the default Apache on Mac OS X - and it's working. When I start apache and run: passenger-memory-stats I get results expected from the installation guide, so that tells me passenger is running.
However, when I try and deploy a simple hello world Rails application I get a slew of "We're sorry…" or no result at all and just a blank page.
I am fairly sure my development environment is correct, everything works except this last bit. I can picture development taking place on a pow.cx server, and once deployment is ready you simply copy the Rails application and configure Apache's VHOST to point to your ready-to-deploy app while Passenger handles the rest, is that correct?
I am using PostgresSQL via the Postgress.app, the server works fine and I can connect to it.
I have gem 'pg' in my Gemfile.
I have already read, and tried every conceivable solution from the following SO questions, but I either get no result or empty logs which is… infuriating to say the least:
We're sorry, but something went wrong. - with Rails, Apache, Passenger
Ruby on Rails: How can i edit database.yml for postgresql?
How do I set up the database.yml file in Rails?
https://www.ruby-forum.com/topic/187128
So with all that said, I am trying to deploy this hello world application (which works on a standard rails server) using the following:
INVOKING APPLICATION VIA:
http://dmarket.local:8081/
VHOSTS:
<VirtualHost *:8081>
PassengerEnabled on
RailsEnv production
ErrorLog /Applications/rubystack/apache2/htdocs/helloworld/project_error.log
CustomLog /Applications/rubystack/apache2/htdocs/helloworld/project_error.log combined
ServerName dmarket.local:8081
ServerAlias www.dmarket.local:8081
DocumentRoot "/Applications/rubystack/apache2/htdocs/helloworld/public"
PassengerPreStart http://dmarket.local:8081
<Directory "/Applications/rubystack/apache2/htdocs/helloworld/public">
Allow from all
Options -MultiViews
</Directory>
</VirtualHost>
HOSTS FILE:
127.0.0.1 dmarket.local
127.0.0.1 www.dmarket.local
DATABASE.YML (same for development, test, and production):
adapter: postgresql
encoding: unicode
host: 127.0.0.1
port: 5432
database: tsujp
pool: 5
username: tsujp
password:
A summary of answers to your questions
You don't need Passenger in development. You can develop with Pow, and deploy with Passenger.
But you can use Passenger in development if you want to. It is a good idea to use Passenger in development because that way your development environment will match your production environment more, which reduces the risk of running into unexpected problems when you deploy.
Using Passenger in development is very easy. Use it's Standalone mode, and run passenger start instead of rails server.
Pow is strictly a development-only server. The authors recommend against using it in production.
When you deploy, you touch Passenger. You don't have to touch Passenger until deployment time, but you may.
Production deployment is indeed moving an application under the effects of Passenger, and setting up a virtual host. You will of course also need to install gems (bundle install) setup the database (editing config/database.yml), running database migrations (bundle exec rake db:migrate), etc.
I've also posted updates on the posts that you linked to, in order to make life easier for people who happened to have found those posts via search.
Apache vs Nginx
You will find a lot of people recommending Nginx (e.g. Sergio just did). I second that recommendation. Nginx is faster than Apache, handles slow clients better and is generally easier to use.
Passenger works great with Nginx. It has an Nginx integration mode that is just as easy as the Apache mode. Sergio suggested Nginx + Unicorn or Nginx + Puma, but Nginx + Passenger (which replaces Unicorn/Puma) is much easier to setup, performs great, uses less memory, works better and has more features. Nginx + Unicorn requires a lot of configuration, process management using init scripts, etc.
But this is just a recommendation. You don't have to use Nginx. Sticking with Apache + Passenger is fine. Apache works well enough for most people.
Regarding your Passenger problems
However, when I try and deploy a simple hello world Rails application I get a slew of "We're sorry…" or no result at all and just a blank page.
Whenever you get an unexpected error, the first thing you should do is to read the log files. There are two log files that are important to you:
The web server error log, typically /var/log/apache/error.log. This log file contains:
Phusion Passenger error messages.
Everything that the Rails application writes to STDERR. This typically consists of errors that Rails encounters during startup (but not errors that it encounters when it's handling requests).
The Rails development log (or production log, in case you're running in production), log/development.log (or log/production.log). When an error occurs during request handling, it is typically logged here. This file does not contain errors that Rails encounters during startup.
The error messages will often tell you what the problem is and how to solve it.
This tip can also be found in the Phusion Passenger manual, Troubleshooting section.
Capistrano
Sergio recommended Capistrano. I second that recommendation. You should remember that Capistrano complements Passenger; it does not replace Passenger. Capistrano is a tool for automating tasks. Do you currently create a tarball of your app and scp it to your server, and extract it there? Well, Capistrano automates this sort of thing for you.
For more information about how all the different pieces of the stack fit together (Apache, Passenger, Capistrano, HAProxy, Chef, etc), check out the section "The big picture" on the Phusion Passenger documentation page.
Recommendation summary
Use passenger start in development. It is by far the easiest to get started with. You don't have to edit any configuration files, it works immediately.
Use Phusion Passenger for Nginx in production.
You don't need Passenger in development. In fact, in development mode you don't need even apache. You can use built-in Webrick server ($ rails server) to run your app. And yes. Pow is a good tool, I use it all the time.
In production there are also multiple options. One of them is Apache+Passenger, yes. But you need to put Nginx in front of those (because Apache doesn't handle slow clients very well). If you have nginx, then you can replace apache+passenger with something else. For a long time I've been using Unicorn (ruby web server from github). Now my current favourite is Puma. It uses less resources than unicorn, but has more requirements to your code (it better be thread-safe, because puma is a threaded server).
Now, to the development-production discrepancy: it is known that development should resemble production as closely as possible, because it minimizes risks when deploying. So, my suggestion is: use unicorn everywhere (both development and production). Only on production put nginx in front of it.
Also,
for actually performing deploys, look into Capistrano. It became industry standard for deploying rails apps (but it can also deploy PHP, static files and what have you).
Here is my setup:
Mac OS X 10.6
Ruby 1.8.7
Rails 3.1
I have a Rails 3.1 application that starts with Unicorn every time this machine starts up (via a .plist in /Library/LaunchDaemons). The .plist essentially does this:
cd /my_application_directory
sudo unicorn -E production -p 80
And everything's working fine. However, I'd like to be able to set up SSL so that traffic is encrypted. I don't need a real certificate signed by a real CA, because the application is only accessible over a local network.
I've found articles like this one on generating certs, but I'm not sure where to go from there (or even if that's the correct starting place).
For my basic needs, I've found the .plist method to be much easier to work with than something like Phusion Passenger, so I'd like to continue doing it that way if possible.
Any help would be greatly appreciated!
I don't believe Unicorn supports being an SSL endpoint, so you're going to need another process to decrypt/encrypt the traffic for you.
On Mac, it's probably easiest to use apache, because it's already installed.
Sorry to not have detailed steps, but you're looking to do the following:
Change the port unicorn listens on, to prevent conflicts with apache.
Set up Apache to serve SSL, just like your linked reference.
Also set up apache to proxy requests to be handled by Unicorn, on the new port you setup. This involves the ProxyPass (and possibly ProxyPassReverse) directive.
Configure apache to start when the Mac boots.
I was researching to set up my linux (ubuntu) vps for rails. And almost all of the guides I've read tells me to install passenger. But none of the guides explain what it is (atleast not in simple terms). So I was wondering if someone could explain in simple terms what exactly passenger is.
I'm trying to set up my VPS so I can easily push code to it from git, and deploy my app (Easy as heroku?) Any suggestions?
Your web server (apache/nginx) serves HTTP requests for files, like stylesheets and images. But, it doesn't know how to process programming code. In PHP, for example, you have to enable mod_php to allow PHP to run.
Passenger is to ruby/rails what mod_php is to PHP.
Your web server still serves static files, but has passenger run your ruby code.
Passenger usually works with Apache/nginx.
Passenger does the dynamic things, Apache/nginx serves
static files and helps passenger to communicate with user-agents
mod passenger or phusion passenger is a module to deploy ruby on rails application in nginx or apache . Currently you must be using either web brick or mongrel. using mod passenger you can have the full power of nginx or apache at your disposal,
As we install rails it uses its own web server WEBrick. If i want to run ths application in Nginx server, then how to configure or set the Nginx web werver?
You should run your rails application in a production server such as mongrel_cluster or thin (I have used the former, and am currently switching to the latter). To put nginx in front of it, I would use the upstream and proxy_pass directives. I found a nice blog post comparing ways of running rails applications that shows their config for mongrel_cluster + nginx.
Passenger is also available for nginx, I've used that with Apache and it was very easy to set up.