Scott Motte

Launching your rails app with passenger on slicehost

Ryan Bates has a very nice video tutorial on installing passenger at modrails.com.

It isn’t slicehost specific though, so here’s some help.

For the part where Ryan adds the necessary passenger lines to httpd.conf (the apache config file) instead for slicehost users edit the /etc/apache2/apache2.conf file.

sudo nano /etc/apache2/apache2.conf

& paste at the end of the file

   LoadModule passenger_module /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/passenger-2.0.2/ext/apache2/mod_passenger.so
   PassengerRoot /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/passenger-2.0.2
   PassengerRuby /usr/bin/ruby1.8

Then upload your rails app to the public folder like you would php files or index files (assuming you setup your apache like slicehost recommended in Apache Virtual Hosts #1

Finally, make sure you apache sites-available config file is setup correctly (full example). The document root should be something like:

DocumentRoot /home/demo/public_html/yoursite.com/public/public

and yes, that is two publics - the first one is the one as setup here, and the second is the rails app’s public folder

Also, you might need to restart your apache.

sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 reload

Useful:
- Configuring passenger on slicehost by Ben Hughes