The error: When setting up a Rails site with Passenger, you get the following message in your browser:
This web application process is being run as user 'nobody' and group 'nobody' and must be able to access its application root directory '/var/www/vhosts/mysite.com/httpdocs'. However this directory is not accessible because it has wrong permissions. Please fix these permissions first.
Read on for an explanation and solution…
I'm on a Media Temple DV 4.0, running CentOS 5.8. I'm using Passenger 4.0.10. Today is 7 Aug, 2013. If your setup is too far off mine, ignore this post!
There's a lot of detailed info here, but my abbreviation of the situation is as follows.
The contents of the directory /var/www/vhosts/mysite.com/httpdocs were owned by user/group root:root. This was because I'd logged in as root and SFTP'd up the files. (Note to self: don't do that in future!)
Now, apache runs as the root user. However, passenger won't run as root, for security reasons. So what user does passenger run as?
The passenger website says: to make a long story short: it will switch to the owner of the file config/environment.rb. […] We rely on the system administrator to set the correct owner on that file.
The system adminstrator! That's us! So Passenger relies on us to make sure config/environment.rb has the right owner, but we've got it owend by root:root. FAIL.
Because Passenger won't run as root:root, it will just run as nobody:nobody.
Find the owner/group of your Document Root (ie, your httpdocs folder, or equivalent) - the folder that contains your entire rails install. Then, recursively set everything inside that folder to be owned by the same user/group (assuming, of course, that user/group isn't root:root).
For me, it meant cd-ing into the correct directory, and then running:
chown -R my_user:psaserv ./httpdocs
(Obviously, you'll need to replace my_user:psaserv with your username:groupname)
I didn't need to re-start Passenger, Apache or anything else at this point. I was just able to refresh my browser and it worked.