Ok, I don't know how long this thing will cope with my big ole blog but so far it's handling things quite quickly.

So as with all, here's what I did to make my rails blog run under Phusion Passenger

sudo gem install passenger
passenger-install-apache2-module

Follow the on-screen instructions then when it gives you the paths for the Apache modules, place those in a file called passenger.load in your /etc/apache2/mods-available directory

For me this was...

nano /etc/apache2/mods-available/passenger.load

LoadModule passenger_module /usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/passenger-2.0.6/ext/apache2/mod_passenger.so
PassengerRoot /usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/passenger-2.0.6
PassengerRuby /usr/local/bin/ruby

Save & close the file, then load in the Passenger module

sudo a2enmod passenger

Now create your new Rails site's Virtual host file

nano /etc/apache2/sites-available/myblog.com

Use this for an example,

# domain: myblog.com
# public: /apps/myblog.com/

<VirtualHost *:80>
  # Admin email, Server Name (domain name) and any aliases
  ServerAdmin john@myblog.com
  ServerName  myblog.com
  ServerAlias www.myblog.com

  # Document Root (where the public files are located)
  DocumentRoot /apps/myblog.com/public

  <Directory /apps/myblog.com/public>
    Options FollowSymLinks
    AllowOverride None
    Order allow,deny
    Allow from all
  </Directory>

  # Very Important - forces Apache to realise this is a Rails Site
  RailsBaseURI /

  # Custom log file locations
  LogLevel warn
  ErrorLog  /apps/myblog.com/log/error.log
  CustomLog /apps/myblog.com/log/access.log combined

</VirtualHost>

Save the file and enable your site

sudo a2ensite myblog.com

This will enable the site and copy the virtual host file to /etc/apache2/sites-enabled signifying it's live.

Next up restart Apache

sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 reload

In whatever way you see fit,

sudo apache2ctl graceful
sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

Enjoy,

By the way whenever you change the code on the server and want Passenger to do a refresh either restart Apache or touch this file, Passenger should get the idea,

touch /apps/myblog/tmp/restart.txt

This was done on Ubuntu Intrepid, using Apache 2.2, Rails 2.2 and Ruby 1.8.7 (latest stable).

Bug in RubyGems 1.3

Just got an email from Hongli Lai over at the Passenger team, haven't noticed this one but there's a bug with RubyGems 1.3 in which Passenger will fall over unless the Ruby apps environment.rb is owned by someone with a home directory.

This should do it

chown john /apps/myblog/config/environment.rb

More here