August 15, 2009 By: <a href="/about">Hamish Rickerby</a>

Passenger (Ruby on Rails) + PHP on OSX

I've spent the last hour or so trying various things out to get passenger and PHP to play nicely together on my mac under OS X (Leopard) and apache2.

The situation I was finding was that PHP apps would run, but only if you explicitly call the script (ie index.php) rather than just the directory. If you called the directory, passenger would take over and give me a rails routing error.

The issue was to do with the passenger vhosts configuration. On my machine I have an number of ruby on rails apps configured with the passenger preferences pane (creating vhost entries within /private/etc/apache2/passenger_pane_vhosts/. I have enabled user_dirs, so that the users of my machine's pages (and other apps) are served from their ~username/Sites directory.

My users configuration info for apache is installed in /private/etc/apache2/users/, and the instructions to load the configuration from that directory is stored within /private/etc/apache2/extra/httpd-userdir.conf (content below).

# Settings for user home directories
#
# Required module: mod_userdir
#
# UserDir: The name of the directory that is appended onto a user's home
# directory if a ~user request is received.  Note that you must also set
# the default access control for these directories, as in the example below.
#
UserDir Sites
#
# Users might not be in /Users/*/Sites, so use user-specific config files.
#
Include /private/etc/apache2/users/*.conf

To get everything working together nicely, I merely wrapped this inside a vhosts configuration directive, and gave it a ServerName of localhost - so that this vhost would be the one that responds to requests for localhost, rather than some random passenger vhost assuming it was the boss of everything. New /private/etc/apache2/extra/httpd-userdir.conf below.

&lt;VirtualHost *:80&gt;
  ServerName localhost
  UserDir Sites
  Include /private/etc/apache2/users/*.conf
&lt;/VirtualHost&gt;

Thanks to this, all of my rails apps are served under passenger, and I can have static HTML, PHP and camping apps (previously configured - nothing to do with the above) all served from within my ~username/Sites directory.

Hope this helps someone.

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