Passenger/mod_rails fails to initialize in Fedora 12 when starting Apache

Question

I am in the process of setting up a server to run a Ruby on Rails application on Fedora 12, using Passenger.

I am at the stage where I\'ve installed Passenger, set i

Answer 1

I'm having the same issue in CentOS 5.4, SELinux getting in the way of Passenger.

Setting PassengerTempDir to /var/run/passenger simply gives you the same permission errors in the new directory instead of /tmp :

[Mon Feb 22 11:42:40 2010] [error] *** Passenger could not be initialized because of this error: Cannot create directory '/var/run/passenger/passenger.3686'

I can then change the security context of /var/run/passenger to get past this error:

chcon -R -h -t httpd_sys_content_t /var/run/passenger/

...and that lets Passenger create the temp directory, but not files within that directory:

[Mon Feb 22 12:07:06 2010] [error] *** Passenger could not be initialized because of this error: Cannot create FIFO file /var/run/passenger/passenger.3686/.guard: Permission denied (13)

Oddly, re-running the recursive chcon again doesn't get past this error, it keeps dying at this point, and this is where my SELinux knowledge gets murky.

The Phusion Passenger guide sections 6.3.5 and 6.3.7 have some useful thoughts, but they don't seem to completely resolve the problem.