I've just spent several days intermittently trying to get a development rails app working again under passenger on OS X.
I still don't understand what happened.
This app was working fine until a few days ago. All of a sudden it would fail to initialize. The backtrace in the apache error log showed that a vendored gem (aws-s3) was not finding something it needed from a non-vendored gem (mime-types).
The same app would come up find under script/server
After much head-scratching I finally noticed that passenger (which had been started using a darwinports installed ruby in /opt/local) and which had the darwinports paths set in the apache configuration, was spawning daemons using /System/Library/Frameworks/Ruby.framework/Ruby instead of /opt/local/bin/ruby, and the system installation of ruby was looking for gems in the wrong place, among other things.
I can't think of anything which I'd done to cause this.
I tried reinstalling the passenger apache module and restarting apache, but no joy.
I then updated the passenger gem to the latest version, reinstalled the passenger apache module, and restarted apache, same thing.
Then I rebooted the MacBook and it seems to be working again, but since I don't know what caused this the first time, I'm not sure it won't come back.
Does anyone have any insight about this?