Why do I have to manually start a passenger instance for nginx sub domain to see my app?

I have a rails api app and a static react front-end app and I have been trying to get the rails app to run on a subdomain for over 24 hrs now. I got it all hooked up yesterday and ended with a 302 bad gateway error, I got back to it this morning and did a number of things including changing the owner of the app files and finally tried manually starting a passenger instance which worked.

I have another rails app deployed on another droplet and it doesn’t seem to need me to manually start passenger, why is it that for my api I need to do so?

Here is the config files in case someone has a better way to set all of this up:

upstream app_server { server 127.0.0.1:8080 fail_timeout=0; }

server {
    listen   80;
    root /var/www/my-rails-app/public;
    server_name api.my-domain.net;
#    index index.htm index.html;

    passenger_enabled on;
    passenger_ruby /usr/local/rvm/gems/ruby-2.6.4/wrappers/ruby;

    passenger_env_var POSTGRES_USER 'database_username';
    passenger_env_var POSTGRES_PASSWORD 'database_password';
    passenger_env_var POSTGRES_HOST 'localhost';
    passenger_env_var POSTGRES_DB 'database_name';
    passenger_env_var SECRET_KEY_BASE secret_key;


    location / {
        try_files $uri/index.html $uri.html $uri @app;
    }

    location ~* ^.+\.(jpg|jpeg|gif|png|ico|zip|tgz|gz|rar|bz2|doc|xls|exe|pdf|ppt|txt|tar|mid|midi|wav|bmp|rtf|mp3|flv|mpeg|avi)$ {
                    try_files $uri @app;
    }

    location @app {
        proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
        proxy_set_header Host $http_host;
        proxy_redirect off;
        proxy_pass http://app_server;
    }
}

server {
    listen   80;
    root /var/www/my-rails-app/client/build;
    server_name my_domain.net www.my-domain.net;
    index index.htm index.html;

    location / {
        try_files $uri $uri/ =404;
    }

    error_page 404 /404.html;
    error_page 500 502 503 504 /50x.html;
    location = /50x.html {
        root /usr/share/nginx/html;
    }
}

I finally got the app to run with this config once I cd’d into my app folder and manually started passenger using this command:

passenger start -a 127.0.0.1 -p 8080 -d -e production

Any Idea why that was necessary when it’s not necessary on my other rails app? Is there a better way to do this?