Question

I’m a newby to rails and love the language and the development environment. However, I’ve been overly frustrated trying to push a new app to the production environment when not using PostgreSQL and/or Heroku.

For work related reasons we are using a rackspace cloud server with MySQL as the database.

My frustration has come with setting up passenger and Nginx. I’ve followed Ryan’s Railscasts on deploying to vps and this tutorial.

I can get through installing ruby, mysql, passenger, Nginx, dependencies, and rails on the server. But when I try to start Nginx nothing happens. When I say nothing happens I mean I don’t have any indication that it’s running. I point my browser to the ip address and I get the standard error “this webpage is not available” error in the browser. I’ve looked at the error log and it’s blank. I haven’t deployed my app yet…just trying to see the default screen of Nginx.

Any ideas? I’m guessing there is a key step I’m missing in configuring Nginx I just don’t know what it is.

My Access Log

.0.0.1 - - [14/Oct/2012:10:40:03 -0500] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 151 "-" "Wget/1.13.4 (linux-gnu)"
127.0.0.1 - - [14/Oct/2012:10:45:03 -0500] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 151 "-" "Wget/1.13.4 (linux-gnu)"
127.0.0.1 - - [14/Oct/2012:10:50:03 -0500] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 151 "-" "Wget/1.13.4 (linux-gnu)"
127.0.0.1 - - [14/Oct/2012:10:55:03 -0500] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 151 "-" "Wget/1.13.4 (linux-gnu)"
127.0.0.1 - - [14/Oct/2012:11:00:03 -0500] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 151 "-" "Wget/1.13.4 (linux-gnu)"

My Nginx.conf file

user deployer staff;
#user  nobody;
worker_processes  1;

#error_log  logs/error.log;
#error_log  logs/error.log  notice;
#error_log  logs/error.log  info;

#pid        logs/nginx.pid;


events {
    worker_connections  1024;
}


http {
    passenger_root /usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.9.1/gems/passenger-3.0.17;
    passenger_ruby /usr/local/bin/ruby;

    include       mime.types;
    default_type  application/octet-stream;

    sendfile        on;
    #tcp_nopush     on;

    #keepalive_timeout  0;
    keepalive_timeout  65;

    #gzip  on;

    server {
        listen       80;
        server_name  localhost;

        #charset koi8-r;

        #access_log  logs/host.access.log  main;

        location / {
            root   html;
            index  index.html index.htm;
        }

        #error_page  404              /404.html;

        # redirect server error pages to the static page /50x.html
        #
        error_page   500 502 503 504  /50x.html;
        location = /50x.html {
            root   html;
        }
    }

}

Answer 1

From my blog post which was pretty much on this exact setup http://blog.nikoroberts.com/post/45834702235/setting-up-a-rails-32-server-in-the-rackspace

You are at least missing
passenger_enabled on;

My nginx.conf

worker_processes  4;

events {
  worker_connections  1024;
}

http {
  passenger_root /home/deployer/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.3-p194/gems/passenger-3.0.17;
  passenger_ruby /home/deployer/.rvm/wrappers/ruby-1.9.3-p194/ruby;

  include       mime.types;
  default_type  application/octet-stream;

  sendfile        on;

  keepalive_timeout  65;

  client_max_body_size 5M;

  gzip  on;
  gzip_http_version 1.1;
  gzip_comp_level 1;
  gzip_disable "MSIE [1-6]\.(?!.*SV1)";
  gzip_proxied any;
  gzip_vary on;
  gzip_min_length 500;
  gzip_types text/plain text/css application/json application/x-javascript text/xml application/xml application/xml+rss text/javascript;
  passenger_default_user deployer;
  #fast passenger respawn
  passenger_pool_idle_time 1000;

  server {
    listen 80;
    charset utf-8;
    server_name localhost;
    root /var/www/contactguru/current/public;
    passenger_enabled on;
    rails_env production;

    # fast passenger and rails respawn
    # from http://stackoverflow.com/a/2329221
    rails_spawn_method smart;
    rails_app_spawner_idle_time 0;
    rails_framework_spawner_idle_time 0;

    location ~ ^/(assets)/  {
      root /var/www/contactguru/current/public;
      gzip_static on;
      expires max;
      add_header Cache-Control public;
      # access_log /dev/null;
    }
  }
}