Unable to start the Phusion Passenger watchdog?

Question

I have done a Phusion Passenger setup on Ubuntu 10.04, with Apache2. Whenever I restart the Apache server I got the following error message, and the Rails application is not

Answer 1

It had been a while since I had restarted nginx and in the meantime the path to passenger had changed. I looked in the nginx.conf to see what the passenger_root was set to and realized that it was the old value:

http {
    passenger_root /home/nginx/rails_app/myapp/shared/bundle/ruby/1.9.1/gems/passenger-enterprise-server-3.0.17;

There are often two places to change:

server {
    listen 8888;
    root /home/nginx/rails_app/myapp/current/public;

I restarted nginx and the error was gone.

Answer 2

I ran into the same problem when compiling from source, but it was intermittent, which was really frustrating (I think it has to w/ Rails environments). We couldn't use the passenger-install-apache2-module/passenger-install-nginx-module scripts, because we needed a customized nginx installation.

I finally fixed the problem by going to whatever the passenger-config --root is, then running: rake nginx.

Update February 2016 (by Passenger author):

The officially supported method to compile PassengerAgent (without also compiling Nginx, as passenger-install-nginx-module does) is with this command:

passenger-config compile-agent

Passenger 5.0.26 and later will automatically detect the error described in this StackOverflow question, and will automatically suggest running the above command.

Answer 3

I had the same issue on my Nginx-Server.
In my case, the passenger_root directory was not correct, because of gem update.

[1] On Linux, i searched the passenger Directory with the following Command:

find / -name PassengerWatchdog

[2] Now i changed my 'passenger_root' Value to this Directory.
[3] And restart the Server.

suvankar, Maybe you should change your Passenger Path too.

Answer 4

Try to install passenger module by running script passenger-install-apache2-module . I had same problem but on nginx; I installed passenger via gem and then recompiled nginx manually with passenger module - this caused error described by you. After running passenger-install-nginx-module such error disappeared.

Answer 5

I've just hit this error myself and struggled to find a good answer, so here's my writeup. In my setup I'm going for Ubuntu, Apache2, the latest Passenger and Rails 2.3.

1. Install Ruby and Rubygems NB: make (very) sure your gem -v is correct, if it's wrong you'll do all this twice
2. sudo gem install passenger
3. cd /usr/lib
4. wget http://rubyforge.org/frs/download.php/76005/passenger-3.0.12.tar.gz
5. tar zxvf passenger-3.0.12.tar.gz
6. cd passenger-3.0.12
7. ./bin/passenger-install-apache2-module
8. Add export PATH=/var/lib/gems/1.8/bin:$PATH to ~/.bashrc
9. ln -s /usr/lib/passenger-3.0.12 /usr/share/phusion-passenger # => this fixes a world of hurt to do with PassengerWatchdog. NB: PassengerWatchdog doesn't come down with apt-get which is why we grabbed the binaries.
10. ln -s /usr/lib/passenger-3.0.12 /usr/lib/phusion-passenger # => similar issues.

This is from memory following thrashing it through for the last day and a half, I'll tidy up when I have to go through it again.