Deploying Rails app requires Apache restart to show changes

Question

I'm deploying a Rails 4.2.1 app to an Apache / Passenger server with Capistrano 3.4.0.

The trouble is, when I do cap production deploy, no changes appear until I restart Apache.

Why is that? Does this have to do with my not having a tmp/restart.txt file in my app directory? (I seem to remember that was required for previous Rails versions)

Everything else works fine, as in cap production deploy updates the current directory of the app on the server. There are no errors in the capistrano deploy log.

Answer 1

You have to notify passenger to reload (redeploy) application. One way of doing it is by touching tmp/restart.txt file.

You can also use capistrano-passanger GEM capistrano can take care of that for you. It is also doing it more effectively by using passenger-config restart-app command for passanger >= 5.