Comments on: Replacing Mongrel with Passenger (mod_rails)

By: HOWTO: Ruby on Rails with Apache + Passenger (Mod_Rails) ~ Ubuntu Lucid Lynx 10.04 - Mike's burogu

Sun, 06 Jun 2010 08:59:17 +0000

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By: Dave

Dave — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 11:31:13 +0000

I don’t understand how javascript and stylesheet tags would have affected where images were loaded from, so I suspect it was the “et cetera” that fixed it.

Good to know about the overlapped host configs. Thanks.

By: Pekka Taipale

Pekka Taipale — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 09:05:27 +0000

Uh forgot some tags in there, so what I wrote is not visible. The explicit tags I meant were
stylesheet_path “css/main.css”
javascript_include_tag “ui.js”
et cetera.

By: Pekka Taipale

Pekka Taipale — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 09:04:17 +0000

I got around this by using explicit tags and et cetera.

The next problem was that in another host, I couldn’t make Rails run at all, whatever I tried. Checked a million times that Apache has got the module, experimented with load order, tried all sorts of virtual host configurations. Until I found out that in a config file for a completely different virtual host (running in the same server), the file also included a duplicate virtual host definition for the virtual host that i was using! Thus the RailsBaseURI definitions I had added and deleted so many times were all the time ignored.

So, a lesson to be learned: be sure that your virtual host config is clear and there are no overlaps. This overlap was not done by me but another system maintainer, it had been there for a long while – it just hadn’t interfered with anything until this.

By: Dave

Dave — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 00:36:11 +0000

You are correct, things should have come from your sub URI. Stupid question, I’m sure, but did you restart Apache? I know I’ve made that mistake once or twice (OK, maybe more, but who’s counting).

I did this for http://sermo.com/newsscores and followed the Passenger docs exactly (see http://www.modrails.com/documentation/Users%20guide.html#deploying_rails_to_sub_uri). In my case, only /newsscores was handled by Passenger. The rest was a simple PHP site that existed before.

You can post more of your apache configs. Maybe I can figure something out. Feel free to email me at dave AT [this domain] if you would rather not make things too public.

By: Pekka Taipale

Pekka Taipale — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 22:00:09 +0000

Thanks for the hint. Passenger looks very nice.

However, there is one configuration quirk that I haven’t figured out yet.

What I do is try to run a Rails application through a sub URI in Apache. It behaves differently from webrick. In other words: when I did run “rorapp” in webrick, I said

$ cd ~/src/rorapp
$ script/server

and pointed my browser to http://localhost:3000 . This works.

Now, with the sub URI, I have Apache document root at /var/www, and I have said ln -s ~/src/rorapp/public /var/www/rorapp. I have configured this directory with directives in Apache configuration, in a virtual host section:

RailsBaseURI /rorapp
RailsEnv development

And the application starts to load, but for some reason any files the index.html.erb tries to load are fetched from server root, not from the sub URI directory! The application in Webrick mode fetches background.jpg from /images/background.jpg and this is fine, but in sub URI mode it should be fetched from /rorapp/images/background.jpg. And NO, I do not have absolute path names in my app, I have relative path names. Still, the browser tries to read them with absolute paths (I checked this with Wireshark).

Any clues?