Trouble putting Rails App into Production with apache2

rubyonrails-talk
1

Hello,

I am trying to put a rails app I development into production. When I alter my apache config like so:

SetEnv RAILS_ENV production (used to be SetEnv RAILS_ENV development)

and reload apache, the site still stays in development mode. I do the following on my homepage to check what environment I'm using: <%= RAILS_ENV %>

However, if I add this line to my environment.rb: ENV['RAILS_ENV'] ||= 'production'

The application successfully switches into production mode.

I do have complete control over my server, so I'm trying to "properly" put the application in production mode, vs. editing the environment.rb file.

Any suggestions? Let me know if posting more code / commands would be helpful.

Thanks,

Sean

2

What does

SetEnv ENV[‘RAILS_ENV’] production

get you? I noticed this weekend that Apache2 seems to define ENV in some kind of weird way. If it at all does. ENV == {} in environment.rb for me. I’m curious what the deal is.

RSL

3

Hi Russell,

I tried as you suggested, but it doesn't work. I found this though:

http://lists.radiantcms.org/pipermail/radiant/2006-October/002105.html

which states

"SetEnv happens on a per-request basis, but your Rails process starts in the context of Apache not that of a request."

and that statement leads me to believe that it doesn't matter what I have configured in my site-specific configuration.

Where's the right spot to configure for a Rails/Apache2/fcgi setup to switch from development to production?

thanks,

Sean

4

Anyone? This is puzzling me too.

RSL

5

If you are using Apache2 to proxy to Mongrel, then the Mongrel processes need to be running in Rails production mode, and nothing you do in Apache config will help.

  mongrel_rails -e production -p <port> ...

6

What if we’re not using Mongrel?

RSL

7

Perhaps you should be? :slight_smile:

Try setting the environement variable:

   RAILS_ENV=production

Before starting up your Rails instance and that should do the trick.

8

Oh, I’m sure I should be but my budget has me on shared hosting at the moment and last time I looked Mongrel and shared hosting didn’t want to play well together. I do run Mongrel on my desktop to develop but even here when I use Apache[2] I don’t mongrelize because that’s not what the end host is. :confused:

RSL

9

Are you on Dreamhost? I've had to add this to the top of my dispatch.fcgi files for Rails apps on Dreamhost:

  ENV['RAILS_ENV'] = 'production'

I also have a cron that hits the site every 5 minutes to keep it in memory.

10

Yeah. I am a DHer. There’s also the stopgap line like that you can uncomment in config/environment.rb [which for me was just as easy to uncomment via Capistrano on deploy] but I was curious about finding the real solution to Apache2’s problem. Which, I guess, we did find with that whole request scope issue. :confused:

I did discover the perfect reaper action though, for Apache2 [presuming you’re not using Mongrel]

script/process/reaper -a graceful -d dispatcher.fcgi

Seems like the default reaper task doesn’t actually restart the dispatcher. If you run it multiple times, watch the PID[s] it says it’s restarting. They never change because they’re never affected. Graceful works nicely though and actually stops the dispatcher. Just a tip. :slight_smile:

RSL

11

Hi Folks,

I decided just to live with putting the application into production by modifying the environment.rb file.

I appreciate all your suggestions. Thanks a lot.

Sean