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unable to run multiple rails apps on passenger+nginx

Added by Nagaraj Ganachari at 2011-07-04 12:30 pm

Hi all,
I want to run multiple rails applications on passenger+nginx.
I am trying to run two seperate applications, chiliproject and
gitorious(mainline)
I have tried the below steps to setup sub_uri.
http://www.modrails.com/documentation/Users%20guide%20Nginx.html
I am not able to run the applications as

http://0.0.0.0:3000/mainline

how to setup sub_uri to run more than one rails applications.

steps to reproduce

1) my nginx.conf is

#user  nobody;
worker_processes  1;

#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 /opt/ruby-enterprise-1.8.7-2011.03/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/passenger-3.0.7;
   passenger_ruby /opt/ruby-enterprise-1.8.7-2011.03/bin/ruby;

   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;

   server {
       listen       80;
       server_name  localhost;

       #charset koi8-r;

       #access_log  logs/host.access.log  main;

       location / {
           root   /home/chiliproject/chiliproject-2.0.0RC3/public;
           index login;
           passenger_enabled on;
           passenger_base_uri /mainline/public;

       }

       #error_page  404              /404.html;

       # redirect server error pages to the static page /50x.html
       #
       error_page   500 502 503 504  /50x.html;
       location = /50x.html {
           root   html;
       }

       # proxy the PHP scripts to Apache listening on 127.0.0.1:80
       #
       #location ~ \.php$ {
       #    proxy_pass   http://127.0.0.1;
       #}

       # pass the PHP scripts to FastCGI server listening on 127.0.0.1:9000
       #
       #location ~ \.php$ {
       #    root           html;
       #    fastcgi_pass   127.0.0.1:9000;
       #    fastcgi_index  index.php;
       #    fastcgi_param  SCRIPT_FILENAME  /scripts$fastcgi_script_name;
       #    include        fastcgi_params;
       #}

       # deny access to .htaccess files, if Apache's document root
       # concurs with nginx's one
       #
       #location ~ /\.ht {
       #    deny  all;
       #}
   }

   # another virtual host using mix of IP-, name-, and port-based configuration
   #
   #server {
   #    listen       8000;
   #    listen       somename:8080;
   #    server_name  somename  alias  another.alias;

   #    location / {
   #        root   html;
   #        index  index.html index.htm;
   #    }
   #}

   # HTTPS server
   #
   #server {
   #    listen       443;
   #    server_name  localhost;

   #    ssl                  on;
   #    ssl_certificate      cert.pem;
   #    ssl_certificate_key  cert.key;

   #    ssl_session_timeout  5m;

   #    ssl_protocols  SSLv2 SSLv3 TLSv1;
   #    ssl_ciphers  ALL:!ADH:!EXPORT56:RC4+RSA:+HIGH:+MEDIUM:+LOW:
+SSLv2:+EXP;
   #    ssl_prefer_server_ciphers   on;

   #    location / {
   #        root   html;
   #        index  index.html index.htm;
   #    }
   #}

}

2) ln -s /home/chiliproject/mainline/public /home/chiliproject/chiliproject-2.0.0RC3/mainline

please help.
Thanks...
Nagaraj P G


Replies (1)

RE: unable to run multiple rails apps on passenger+nginx - Added by Holger Just at 2011-07-04 01:16 pm

Nagaraj,

First, I fixed your formatting so I can understand what you are trying to do...

Then judging from your config, you mix up a whole lot of concepts and ideas regarding application deployment, esp. on Passenger.

The basic idea is that you have Rails applications somewhere on your disk. Now you need to configure your Nginx that it finds those Rails applications and binds them to a URL path. This is important to understand. You basically define a mapping from a URL path to a filesystem path (hence a Rails application living there).

Passenger has two distinct variants on achieving this.

The first variant is for root installs, i.e. when your Rails application should be served from the root path of your web host with a URL like http://example.com/. This is achieved by setting the root of a server to the public directory of a rails app which you do in your location block.

The seconds variant is to have apps at another path, different from /, like e.g. /mainline. This requires two configuration steps:

  1. You need to tell nginx (hence passenger) that a certain URL path should be considered a Rails app. This can be done using the passenger_base_uri statement.
  2. You need to help passenger find the application in the filesystem.

When recieving a request for a URL, passenger tries to find the location of the app in the filesystem by first mapping the requested URL to the filesystem as is would normally do (by using the root and location directives). As you have told passenger that a certain URL path is a rails app, it tries to find a matching symlink pointing to that app in the filesystem.

So consider the following setup:

server {
  listen 80;
  server_name example.com;
  root /srv/www;
  passenger_base_uri /mainline;
}

With this setup, passenger expects a symlink in the filesystem at /srv/www/mainline pointing to the public directory of a rails app (like /home/chiliproject/mainline/public in your case). With that in place, it finds the application and properly starts it.

Now we have a third variant, namely when you want to have a rails app at the root and another one in a subpath, which seems what you want to achieve. Then, you have to setup the application at the root first. as you would normally do. See the guide for that. Then you need to create a symlink inside the public directory of the first app, as this very public directory is defined as the root dir of that server.

Concluding: I guess, it should work if you create your symlink like this instead:

ln -s /home/chiliproject/mainline/public /home/chiliproject/chiliproject-2.0.0RC3/public/mainline

Also, your passenger_base_uri has to be a URI path, not a filesystem path. So it has to point to /mainline. Again, it's important to understand the difference between a filesystem path and a URI path and that nginx and passenger define a mapping between those.

Hope that helps,
Holger

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