Question

I’m deploying my app to my new Rails 3.1 server with capistrano.

When I’m trying to browse the page, I get a rails error.
While looking in the error.log, this is what I see:

ActionView::Template::Error (Permission denied - /var/www/episodecalendar/production/releases/20111227204950/tmp/cache/55B):
    32:                 </div>
    33:                 <div id="footer">
    34:                   <div id="footer_content">
    35:                     <% cache("footer") do %>
    36:               <%= render :partial => "partials/footer" %>
    37:             <% end %>
    38:             </div>
  app/views/layouts/application.html.erb:35:in `_app_views_layouts_application_html_erb___3483336897212790867_58416560'

Obviously the files in the /tmp folder don’t have the “correct” permissions. Example:

root@Ubuntu:/var/www/episodecalendar/staging/current/tmp/cache/assets/C0C/690# ls -la
total 12K
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4.0K 2011-12-27 21:33 .
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4.0K 2011-12-27 21:33 ..
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 2.6K 2011-12-27 21:33 sprockets%2F31007441199035e09c0c45c33930cf06

The only way to fix it, is a chmod 777 tmp/ -R, and then the site loads straight away.

I could put the chmod fix in a capistrano recipe, but that seems like an ugly hack.
Why doesn’t the /tmp folder have the “correct” permission after a deploy, and how can I fix it?

Answer 1

Rather than permitting everyone access to all files and folders within tmp chmod 777 -R tmp/, you may want to consider ensuring that /var/www/episodecalendar/staging/ is recursively chown’d (chown -R user:group /var/www/episodecalendar/staging) by whatever user requires access to run the web server.

I’d recommend creating a separate deploy@Ubuntu user so that (unlike root) permissions issues become apparent quickly.