Phusion passenger with nginx

Lately I decided to do something different than I was usually inclined to. I was using unicorn as my web application server in my development environment so I wanted to use Phusion passenger.  I was looking forward to use passenger in my production environment, so I thought how about I learn it now to install and run it in my development environment ? It took some time for me to wrap my head around it but eventually I figured it out.

I already had my nginx installed but I had to remove it because I screwed some config files while figuring out   passenger. Any way, the beginning is always the hard part.

I am assuming that you have no nginx installed.  Run this command, it will walk you through a very easy process of installing the server with passenger.

rvmsudo passenger-install-nginx-module

After everything is done, navigate to localhost in your browser. It should be working.

If you have ruby installed via rvm then no problemo. In your terminal run

Open up your /opt/nginx/conf/nginx.conf file and add the value of command from the terminal output to passenger_ruby

passenger_ruby /home/sushant/.rvm/gems/ruby-2.2.3/wrappers/ruby;

The work is still not done yet. You still have to put the right value for passenger_root. Just type

passenger-config --root

and it will output the location to the passenger. Copy that and paste it in your nginx.conf file like so

passenger_root /home/sushant/.rvm/gems/ruby-2.2.3/gems/passenger-5.0.20;

Now browser localhost and you will see the default nginx page.Lets add a vhost in case if that is what you are looking for.

server {
        passenger_ruby /home/sushant/.rvm/gems/ruby-2.2.3/wrappers/ruby;
        rails_env development; # add this if you get error like “Incomplete response received from application” from nginx / passenger
        listen 80;
        server_name sushant.com *.sushant.com;
        root /usr/share/nginx/html/fuitter/public;

        # You must explicitly set 'passenger_enabled on', otherwise
        # Passenger won't serve this app.
        passenger_enabled on;
    }

Ok now to make your changes take effect, you have to restart your server. I had to download an init script because it could not find nginx command. So if you had the same problem, again, I got you covered.
git clone git://github.com/jnstq/rails-nginx-passenger-ubuntu.git

sudo mv rails-nginx-passenger-ubuntu/nginx/nginx  /etc/init.d/nginx

sudo chown root:root /etc/init.d/nginx