Phusion Passenger gives ERROR: not running on Ubuntu

Question

I'm trying to user Phusion Passenger to host my Rails 3 app from Ubuntu 11.04. I installed the passenger apache2 module and followed the instructions for editing my apache2.conf file and everything. I also restarted my apache server and I'm getting this:

• Restarting web server apache2 [Tue Aug 09 10:41:36 2011] [warn] module passenger_module is already loaded, skipping apache2: Could not reliably determine the server's fully qualified domain name, using 127.0.1.1 for ServerName ... waiting [Tue Aug 09 10:41:37 2011] [warn] module passenger_module is already loaded, skipping apache2: Could not reliably determine the server's fully qualified domain name, using 127.0.1.1 for ServerName [ OK ]

I'm able to get to localhost/testapp but when I get there, instead of a rails app, I get an "index of /testapp" page with just the file system laid out. When I run the command passenger-status, I get this:

ERROR: Phusion Passenger doesn't seem to be running.

Any ideas?

Answer 1

There are probably multiple issues on your system, but this one is the most obvious:

[warn] module passenger_module is already loaded, skipping

This means you have two "LoadModule passenger_module ..." directives in your config files. The old one is probably stale and points to an older version of Phusion Passenger. You need to remove that or it'll cause conflicts.

The other one is probably related to filesystem permissions. The user that Apache runs as must be able to check whether the file 'config/environment.rb' and 'config.ru' exist in your app root, i.e. it must have executable permissions to the necessary directories and all parent directories.

The final possible issue is that you've set DocumentRoot to the application root, but you're supposed to set it to the 'public' directory.