Overview
This article describes how to enable Passenger on your domain within the DreamHost panel.
At DreamHost, Passenger only integrates with servers running Apache.
View the following article if you'd prefer to use Nginx without Passenger instead:
If your Ruby application won't start because of a missing gem, then you must install it locally using Bundler. For more information about using Bundler, please visit the following page:
Enabling Passenger
- Navigate to the Hosted Domains page.
- Click the Edit button to the right of your domain under the Web Hosting column.
- The Hosted Domains settings page opens:
- Scroll down to the Web Options section and check the Passenger (Ruby/NodeJS/Python apps only): check box.
- A WARNING dialog box then appears:
- Click the OK button. The panel adds the /public subdirectory for you.
If you already have a /public directory in the current Web directory, clicking OK will only switch the 'Web directory' to this new /public folder. Nothing in it is removed.
If you do not already have a /public directory, the panel creates it for you with a coming soon page. The files in your current Web directory remain untouched.
- Click the Change settings button to save your changes.
- Whenever the code or configuration files for your application are modified, you must create or update the modification date of the file tmp/restart.txt in the application's root directory tree in order to trigger Passenger to reinitialize the application. Passenger caches many resources so changes are not recognized unless the modification date of tmp/restart.txt is changed.
- The most common method to make this change is to run the following command via SSH.
(Ruby on Rails automatically creates a directory named tmp. If you are creating non-RoR application, you may need to create the tmp directory manually.
[server]$ "touch tmp/restart.txt" .
The "public" subdirectory
- Passenger maps the directory named public to be the document root for your domain/subdomain.
- If a static HTML file named public/index.html exists, it's then used as the response for requests for the root document (i.e., "/").
- If you want your application to handle requests for the root document, then you must first remove "public/index.html" (if it exists).
- By default, Ruby on Rails creates a static public/index.html file.
Likewise, a file inside the public subdirectory that is named with one of the suffixes recognized by Apache (e.g., public/foo.cgi or public/foo.pl) will be treated as an executable CGI script in the usual Apache fashion. (See CGI for more information.)
