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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-17T22:41:04+00:00

I have a sinatra app with a page that shows some information about the

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I have a sinatra app with a page that shows some information about the application. Some of which is generated by running commands on page load. Everything works fine on my MacBook when running in unicorn and everything works fine on the production server when running in unicorn but swap to Apache/Passenger and suddenly the commands start returning nil.

For example to get a list of committers I use:

comitters = `cd /path/to/app && git shortlog -s -n`

This works perfectly until run in the apache/passenger setup.

Is there some option within passenger that disables system commands?

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  1. Editorial Team

    The problem lies in your $PATH environment variable, which the system uses to look for commands. You run Unicorn from the shell don’t you? So Unicorn inherit $PATH from your shell. But app processes started from Phusion Passenger are started from Apache/Nginx, which in turn are usually started from some system init service, which have completely different environment variables than your shell. Read http://blog.phusion.nl/2008/12/16/passing-environment-variables-to-ruby-from-phusion-passenger/ for a solution.

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