Nginx server configuration when using passenger standalone

[Franck D'agostini]

Hi everyone,

I'm using passenger standalone to run several rails 2.x/ruby1.8.7
applications on the same machine.

I start passenger standalone using an home made init script and it
works great (see this thread :
http://groups.google.com/group/phusion-passenger/browse_thread/thread/d96d19fa645a6eae)

My problem is that when I deploy one of these apps via capistrano,
passenger standalone still use the previous app release. When I use my
init script to stop/start the app, the new release is taken now into
account.

Obviously, I don't want to stop the server everytime I deploy a new
release.

Tracking down the issue, I found this nginx configuration file created
on the fly when starting passenger standalone : /tmp/passenger-
standalone.27194.conf

Here is the content :

master_process on;
worker_processes 1;
daemon on;
error_log '/var/www/myapp/releases/20101119094011/log/passenger.
3000.log';
pid '/var/www/myapp/releases/20101119094011/tmp/pids/passenger.
3000.pid';


events {
worker_connections 1024;
}

http {
include '/home/deploy/.passenger/standalone/3.0.0-x86_64-ruby1.8.7-
linux-gcc4.4.3-1002/nginx-0.8.52/conf/mime.types';
client_body_temp_path '/home/deploy/.passenger/standalone/3.0.0-
x86_64-ruby1.8.7-linux-gcc4.4.3-1002/nginx-0.8.52/temp/client';
proxy_temp_path '/home/deploy/.passenger/standalone/3.0.0-x86_64-
ruby1.8.7-linux-gcc4.4.3-1002/nginx-0.8.52/temp/proxy';
passenger_ruby /usr/local/rvm/wrappers/ruby-1.8.7-p302/ruby;
passenger_root '/home/deploy/.passenger/standalone/3.0.0-x86_64-
ruby1.8.7-linux-gcc4.4.3-1002/support';
passenger_abort_on_startup_error on;
passenger_user_switching off;
passenger_max_pool_size 6;
passenger_min_instances 1;

default_type application/octet-stream;
client_max_body_size 50m;
access_log off;
keepalive_timeout 60;
gzip on;
gzip_comp_level 3;
gzip_min_length 150;
gzip_proxied any;
gzip_types text/plain text/css application/javascript application/
x-javascript;

server {
listen 127.0.0.1:3000;
server_name _;
root '/var/www/myapp/releases/20101119094011/public';
passenger_enabled on;
rails_env production;
passenger_spawn_method smart-lv2;
passenger_min_instances 1;
}
}



Oy ! Look at all this paths to my app : /var/www/myapp/releases/
20101119094011 here and there ... The path to my app is hard coded
inside the nginx configuration file created when passenger standalone
starts.

Indeed, I "cd" to the current release and then fire passenger command
to launch the server. The AppFinder class guess the path and find the
real path (/var/www/myapp/releases/xxxxxxx) when I would love to see
the symlink path (/var/www/myapp/current).

Am I missing something ? Does someone see a workaround ? Could we
imagine a additional configuration option such as "--app-root /var/www/
myapp/current" ?

[Hongli Lai]

That would not solve your problem. When the Ruby processes have
started, their current working directories will be tied to that of
your older release regardless of symlink changes. One *must* restart
the server in order for new deploys to have effect. The same is true
for Mongrel, Unicorn and Thin.

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