Ruby/Rails Apache2 & Passenger setup returning directory listing

Question

It's worth nothing, first of all, that I've got a fully-functional Apache2 server (on a Ubuntu 12.04 VPS) with multiple working virtual hosts (but this is my first attempt to deploy a Rails site). Additionally, the Rails site I'm trying to launch is fully functional on my local WEBRick server.

I've referenced various online instructions for making Apache, Ruby, Rails & Passenger play nice together, including:

• This from Linode, my host (they don't offer documentation specific for 12.04)
• This from O'Reilly
• The Passenger documentation that's part of the installation process of passenger-install-apache2-module
• The online Passenger documentation
• Various old SO questions such as this and this

To summarize, so far I've:

1. Installed Ruby (ruby -v in site root returns 1.9.3), RVM, Ruby Gems, Rails (rails -v in app folder returns 3.2.8 and I can start a rails server in the app folder) & Passenger (including all dependencies)

2. As instructed by passenger-install-apache2-module, I've added the following lines to the bottom of /etc/apache2/apache2.conf:

   LoadModule passenger_module /var/lib/gems/1.8/gems/passenger 3.0.17/ext/apache2/mod_passenger.so
   PassengerRoot /var/lib/gems/1.8/gems/passenger-3.0.17
   PassengerRuby /usr/bin/ruby1.8
   

3. Created & enabled (it's listed in /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/) a virtual host /etc/apache2/sites-available/foo.com that contains the following:

   <VirtualHost *:80>
     ServerName foo.com
     DocumentRoot /home/user/public/foo.com/public
     <Directory /home/user/public/foo.com/public>
       AllowOverride all
       Options -MultiViews
     </Directory>
   </VirtualHost>
   

4. Uploaded my Rails app to /home/user/public/foo.com/

5. Did a bundle install in /home/user/public/foo.com/

6. On my local OSX machine, I've add xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx foo.com [the VPS IP] to /etc/hosts.

7. Restarted Apache

But when I navigate to foo.com in the browser, I simply see a listing of /home/user/public/foo.com/public. Also, there are no recent entries in the Apache error.log. However, whenever I restart Apache I get:

 * Restarting web server apache2
[Fri Oct 26 00:04:12 2012] [warn] module passenger_module is already loaded, skipping
 ... waiting [Fri Oct 26 00:04:13 2012] [warn] module passenger_module is already loaded, skipping
   ...done.

I'm hoping I've overlooked something really stupid. Any help figure out what that is would be much, much appreciated. Thanks!

Answer 1

If you're working with apache2.2, you should not include the following in apache2.conf

LoadModule passenger_module /var/lib/gems/1.8/gems/passenger 3.0.17/ext/apache2/mod_passenger.so
PassengerRoot /var/lib/gems/1.8/gems/passenger-3.0.17
PassengerRuby /usr/bin/ruby1.8

Instead you should create 2 files on /etc/apache2/mods-available:

passenger.load with:

LoadModule passenger_module /var/lib/gems/1.8/gems/passenger3.0.17/ext/apache2/mod_passenger.so

passenger.conf with:

PassengerRoot /var/lib/gems/1.8/gems/passenger-3.0.17
PassengerRuby /usr/bin/ruby1.8

Finally you just run:

a2enmod passenger

And it's done. By the way, when you make it work you might consider using a more recent version of ruby (1.9.3... or so). The best way to do that is using RVM.