Passenger doesn't seem to be running (Capistrano/Rails/Apache/Ubuntu)

Question

Deploying a Rails app using Capistrano to an Ubuntu VM running Apache with Passenger enabled.

I followed this tutorial: https://www.phusionpassenger.com/library/install/apache/install/oss/trusty/ with a few changes given that I'm on 17.04, not 14.04 LTS.

passenger-config validate-install says everything looks fine with both Passenger and Apache. passenger-memory-stats shows both Passenger and Apache processes.

I have sudo apache2ctl restarted several times, with no warnings. But passenger-status, and therefore the passenger-config restart-app that Capistrano runs, reports that Passenger "doesn't seem to be running." So my deploy stops.

There's only one Ruby on the machine, ruby-2.4.1 installed using ruby-install. I have apt-get update and upgraded in case of version mismatches.

Apache logs don't show any errors, certainly none related to Passenger.

Why would Passenger internally disagree, saying that it's both configured properly and there are processes running, but then later saying that it's not running?

Answer 1

I needed to customize the instance registry directory, as suggested by Tony Vincent:

/etc/apache2/mods-enabled/passenger.conf on the server:

PassengerInstanceRegistryDir /home/MYUSER/passenger_temp

config/deploy/production.rb in the Rails app:

set :default_env, { 'PASSENGER_INSTANCE_REGISTRY_DIR' => '/home/MYUSER/passenger_temp' }