By billsnapper
I created a new droplet with Ubuntu 18.04 and needed to run a Rails 4.2.1 app using PostgreSQL. I have successfully got the app running using Passenger standalone. I am able to access this from a React webapp with no issue. When I try and get this to run via an Apache front end using Passenger defined in a VirtualHost I am getting permissions errors.
[Wed Jun 03 22:08:29.273380 2020] [authz_core:error] [pid 6382:tid 140663413569280] [client 73.227.226.192:46081] AH01630: client denied by server configuration: /var/www/html/
The only configuration directive I was able to find that looked related to /var/www/html permission was in the top level apache2.conf file.
<Directory /var/www> Options Indexes FollowSymLinks AllowOverride All Require all granted </Directory>
Also, inside the default file, /etc/apache2/sites-available/000-default.conf, the DocumentRoot directive was “DocumentRoot /var/www/html”.
I am not even seeing any errors in /var/log/apache2/error.log related to my app trying to be served. There’s nothing in the app’s log directory.
Also, when I hit the server with my domain I am seeing the default Apache2 Ubuntu page. This is mapped via the default account and when I remove the file I see the permissions error. So it’s definitely processing the 000-default configuration but not my domain configuration and yes, it is enabled.
I have Rails apps running on older versions of Apache 2.2 and Passenger 4. This is bizarre. Also, I noticed that the Passenger process is running as root so maybe it’s a permissions thing, not certain.
Any help / pointers would be appreciated.
Thank you.
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This question was answered by @bill.snapper:
Solved it. Turned out I needed to map the PassengerUser and PassengerGroup in order for this to run the application. This could have been done implicitly by adding a user and then placing the project with the same name as that user in a directory and Passenger would have figured it out.
Instead I chose to use the Passenger directives “PassengerUser” and “PassengerGroup” and set them to the user / group the app is mapped to.
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