Why does my Ruby on Rails install not work ?

On Ruby on Rails with cPanel, we use the standard set of tools that Rails provides, rather than creating our own. This makes troubleshooting relatively easy.

The error_log is always extremely useful with Rails. 90% of the time, a good indication of what is wrong with the Rails installation will be there. Furthermore, if it is an application-specific issue, mongrel maintains its own error log at {appbase}/log/mongrel.log. If an application is starting and failing without anything in the error_log, there will probably be an indication of the problem in here as well.

After that, there need to be a few gems installed. You can check which gems are installed via "gem query":

• mongrel
• rails
• rake

If any of these are missing, you can install them via gem install . If the wrong version is installed, gem uninstall works just fine. There will also be some dependencies that need to be installed as well.

Once you have verified all of this and the application is still not starting correctly, you can start the mongrel server manually with the command mongrel_rails start -p -d -e production -P log/mongrel.pid from the Rails application's base directory as the user who owns the Rails application. The port can be found in ~/.cpanel/ruby-on-rails.db.

If after following these steps you are still not able to fix your Rails installation, please open a ticket with either your data center or us.