Ruby on Rails application could not be started : Solution

Vamsi Krishna

37 sec read

A small tip: If you happen to get the error “Ruby on Rails application could not be started” after installing Phusion Passenger with Apache and If the page simply says like

There may be a syntax error in the application’s code. Please check for such errors and fix them.
A required library may not installed. Please install all libraries that this application requires.
The application may not be properly configured. Please check whether all configuration files are written correctly, fix any incorrect configurations, and restart this application.
A service that the application relies on (such as the database server or the Ferret search engine server) may not have been started. Please start that service.

and if the Error message or Exception class not giving you any useful hint, then the
Solution:
Check that the you rails applicaton folder got proper permission to be accessed by apache user.
You can set it by passing the command…
chown -R www-data:www-data /demo
FYI:
My environment was
Ubuntu 8.10 server
Apache 2.0
Phusion Passenger – Mod rails
Rails 2.3+
Error screenshot:
passenger

Related posts:

3 Replies to “Ruby on Rails application could not be started :…”

  1. You are my saver, since I am new to deploy ROR application. When I met the problem, I did not know how to fix it. I just used your solution, it got my ROR applications running on my server.
    Thank you so much for sharing your valued experiences with us! 🙂
    PS. Will I ask your some help when I have some problem in the future?

  2. Sorry for the dumb question but where are you running this command. Also do my permissions look right to you?
    drwxr-xr-x 16 root root 4096 Feb 3 15:33 .
    drwxr-xr-x 21 root root 4096 Feb 3 15:34 ..
    drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Dec 12 2008 backups
    drwxr-xr-x 9 root root 4096 Feb 3 15:32 cache
    drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Sep 5 2008 games
    drwxr-xr-x 26 root root 4096 Feb 3 15:32 lib
    drwxrwsr-x 2 root staff 4096 Oct 20 2008 local
    drwxrwxrwt 3 root root 80 Feb 3 15:30 lock
    drwxr-xr-x 7 root root 4096 Feb 3 15:32 log
    drwxrwsr-x 2 root man 4096 Dec 12 2008 mail
    drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Dec 12 2008 opt
    drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 Feb 3 15:33 rails
    drwxr-xr-x 7 root root 300 Feb 3 15:31 run
    drwxr-xr-x 4 root root 4096 Feb 3 15:32 spool
    drwxrwxrwt 2 root root 4096 Oct 20 2008 tmp
    drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Feb 3 15:34 www

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *