Question

I want to run the same Rails 3 app at urls: davinci.local.dev:8081 davinci.testing.dev:8082 and with environments development and testing, respectively.

I am using Nginx and passenger. My first attempt was:

server {
      listen 8081;
      server_name .davinci.local.dev;
      root /Users/Nerian/NetBeansProjects/DaVinci/DaVinci/public;
      passenger_enabled on;
      rails_env development;   
      #rails_env development
   }

server {
      listen 8082;
      server_name .davinci.testing.dev;
      root /Users/Nerian/NetBeansProjects/DaVinci/DaVinci/public;
      passenger_enabled on;
      rails_env test;   
      #rails_env development
   }

Yet when I browse to said urls, I get to the same deployment. If I first request the testing one, then it is that the app that is served always, whether I browse to davinci.local.dev or davinci.testing.dev. If I first request the development one, then it is that one which is served always.

Both deployments are using the same root app. Is there a way to make this works?

The objective is to serve the same app at different ENV in different domains.

Answer 1

I had a similar problem. I wanted a Rails application (named apparat) to have two nginx instances: example.eu for english version of the site and example.ee for estonian version. They share exactly the same functionality, so it makes sense to have just one code base for it (but I do have to make sure static assets like user-uploaded images won’t collide).

server {
   listen 80;
   server_name example.eu;
   root /home/apparat/public;
   passenger_enabled on;
   rails_env apparat_eng;
}

server {
   listen 80;
   server_name example.ee;
   root /home/apparat/public;
   passenger_enabled on;
   rails_env apparat_ee;
}

However, similar to above, if I accessed example.ee, I got the example.eu instance of my Rails app. Possibly some quirk in nginx / passenger?

Anyway I got around by making an arbitrary symlink to /home/apparat, for instance

ln -s /home/apparat /home/apparat_eng
ln -s /home/apparat /home/apparat_ee

and changed the nginx config respectively

server {
   listen 80;
   server_name example.eu;
   root /home/apparat_eng/public;
   passenger_enabled on;
   rails_env apparat_eng;
}

server {
   listen 80;
   server_name example.ee;
   root /home/apparat_ee/public;
   passenger_enabled on;
   rails_env apparat_ee;
}

So I’m able to trick nginx into thinking these are different directories.