running multiple rails websites using phusion passenger 3.0.17 with nginx

Question

I searched google for deploying multiple rails websites using phusion passenger 3.0.17 with nginx but I didn't get relevant results. Any how I completed passenger nginx setup by running passenger-install-nginx-module command.

Ques 1) I am looking for proper beginner tutorial for running multiple rails websites using phusion passenger 3.0.17 with nginx

Ques 2) I am looking commands for start, stop, restart the (whole passenger nginx server (ie) for all websites) and also for (Individual rails websites)

Note: I am not looking for passenger standalone solution. I am using REE 1.8.7 and rails 2.3.14

Answer 1

According to the documentation for Passenger, you create a new vhost for each app you want to deploy. And point the site root at your apps public directory, and add the passenger_enabled directive. Exactly the same as deploying with Apache.

http {
    ...

    server {
        listen 80;
        server_name www.mycook.com;
        root /webapps/mycook/public;
        passenger_enabled on;
    }

    ...
}

More here: http://www.modrails.com/documentation/Users%20guide%20Nginx.html#deploying_a_ror_app

In regards question 2. Restarting depends on what you are trying to do. I'm going to assume you're using a distro that uses init.d

These are 3 cases where you do a different kind of 'restart'.

You have an issue with some config you have on Nginx. Or it's behaving strangely. So you would restart the Nginx service like this: /etc/init.d/nginx restart

The next case is you have a rails or sinatra app deployed on Nginx with the passenger module. And you want to make it reload some changes you just pushed to the server. Passenger watches the tmp/restart.txt file in your application. So by simply runnging touch tmp/restart.txt. While cd'd into the app's folder will tell Passenger to reload the application.

And the last case for restarting/reloading is reload for Nginx. You use this when you add or change your VHOSTs. /etc/init.d/nginx reload. This allows you to reload your vhosts and other config without dropping connections.

Have a gander at the Passenger Documentation, it is very thorough. nginx-passenger docs

Answer 2

Here is a step-by-step tutorial on Configuring Nginx for multiple virtual hosts: http://articles.slicehost.com/2007/12/7/ubuntu-gutsy-installing-nginx-via-aptitude

Note that:

1. You cannot restart an individual website/virtual host, if you change some configurations in Nginx conf, as stuartc mentions. You have to restart Nginx for the changes to take effect. You can however do a $ touch current/tmp/restart.txt in the server app directory after pushing files, if you want to apply a production fix directly.
2. I have experience problems with Nginx restart on Ubuntu; explict stop and start seem to give more assured results. Use <NGINX_HOME>/bin/nginx stop to stop and then <NGINX_HOME/bin/nginx to start.

To help you, here are my configuration files.

nginx.conf:

#user  nobody;
worker_processes  4;

#error_log  logs/error.log;
#error_log  logs/error.log  notice;
#error_log  logs/error.log  info;

#pid        logs/nginx.pid;

events {
    worker_connections  1024;
}

http {
    passenger_root /rails/common/ruby-1.9.2-p290/lib/ruby/gems/1.9.1/gems/passenger-3.0.17;
    passenger_ruby /rails/common/ruby-1.9.2-p290/bin/ruby_with_env;

    passenger_max_pool_size 30;
    include       mime.types;
    default_type  application/octet-stream;

    #log_format  main  '$remote_addr - $remote_user [$time_local] "$request" '
    #                  '$status $body_bytes_sent "$http_referer" '
    #                  '"$http_user_agent" "$http_x_forwarded_for"';

    #access_log  logs/access.log  main;

    sendfile        on;
    #tcp_nopush     on;

    #keepalive_timeout  0;
    keepalive_timeout  65;

    gzip  on;

    include /rails/common/nginx/conf/sites-enabled/*.conf;
}

A sample site.conf inside sites-enabled folder:

server {
    listen       80;
    server_name  domainname1.com;
    root /rails/myapp1/current/public;
    passenger_enabled on;

    error_page   500 502 503 504  /50x.html;
    location = /50x.html {
        root   html;
    }

    if (-f $document_root/system/maintenance.html) {
        return 503;
    }
    error_page 503 @maintenance;
    location @maintenance {
        rewrite ^(.*)$ /system/maintenance.html break;
    }
}

A new file in sites-enabled is all it takes to add a new site.