Capistrano 3 not authorized to query the status for this Phusion Passenger instance

Question

Trying to get deploying on Capistrano 3. I'm using NGINX, RVM, Passenger, Rails 4. My deploys are working, but I need to restart NGINX manually - here is the error at the end of the deploy:

    DEBUG [c4e821bc] Command: ~/.rvm/bin/rvm default do passenger -v
DEBUG [c4e821bc]    Phusion Passenger version 5.0.6
DEBUG [c4e821bc]    
DEBUG [c4e821bc]    "Phusion Passenger" is a trademark of Hongli Lai & Ninh Bui.
DEBUG [c4e821bc] Finished in 0.981 seconds with exit status 0 (successful).
 INFO [5082ae94] Running ~/.rvm/bin/rvm default do passenger-config restart-app /home/deploy/skilltry --ignore-app-not-running on 104.237.158.232
DEBUG [5082ae94] Command: ~/.rvm/bin/rvm default do passenger-config restart-app /home/deploy/skilltry --ignore-app-not-running
DEBUG [5082ae94]    *** ERROR: You are not authorized to query the status for this Phusion Passenger instance. Please try again with 'rvmsudo'.
cap aborted!

I've tried a fix over here: https://github.com/capistrano/passenger/issues/2

Use visudo to edit the file (so if you mess up you have the chance to re-edit the file), at the end of the file (*) add the following:

deployuser    ALL=(root) NOPASSWD: /usr/bin/passenger-config

This made no difference

And over here: How can I get passenger-config restart-app to work?

But I get a prompt which I cannot enter:

[sudo] password for deploy: 

Answer 1

Looking at the gems/capistrano-passenger-0.0.5/lib/capistrano/tasks/passenger.cap file, it contains the following defaults:

  task :defaults do
    set :passenger_roles, :app
    set :passenger_restart_runner, :sequence
    set :passenger_restart_wait, 5
    set :passenger_restart_limit, 2
    set :passenger_restart_with_sudo, false
    set :passenger_environment_variables, {}
    set :passenger_restart_command, 'passenger-config restart-app'
    set :passenger_restart_options, -> { "#{deploy_to} --ignore-app-not-running" }
    set :passenger_rvm_ruby_version, ->{ fetch(:rvm_ruby_version) }
    if Rake.application.tasks.collect(&:to_s).include?("rvm:hook")
      before :'rvm:hook', :'passenger:rvm:hook'
    end
    if Rake.application.tasks.collect(&:to_s).include?("rbenv:map_bins")
      before :'rbenv:map_bins', :'passenger:rbenv:hook'
    end
  end

I was able to add the following to deploy.rb to override how the passenger instances are restarted:

set :passenger_restart_command, 'sudo passenger-config restart-app'

You should verify first that your /etc/sudoers config allows password-less execution of that command as root.

Answer 2

I was getting the *** ERROR: You are not authorized to query the status for this Phusion Passenger instance. Please try again with 'sudo'. error as well when I tried to deploy. I found using the capistrano-passenger gem, there's an option to fix this:

# add this to config/deploy.rb
set :passenger_restart_with_sudo, true # default false

You can read up on the docs to see some other options.

Answer 3

Possible issues:

1. Nginx configuration is pointing to a directory where Capistrano user doesn't have access/permission.
2. Nginx configuration isn't listening to the domain you set in your Capistrano config.

Passenger is a “process manager” and uses Nginx to manage http traffic to/from those processes.

Make sure your virtual server is pointing to a directory owned by Capistrano user and the virtual server is listening to the same domain present in your Capistrano configuration.

An example:

Assuming you are deploying to /home/my_user/my_app_path you should set my_user as Capistrano user to deploy the application.

Also assuming your domain is my_app.com, make sure is consistent in both Capistrano and Nginx config.

# Capistrano configuration
server "my_app.com", user: "my_user", roles: %w{app web db}

# Nginx configuration
server {
  listen 80;
  server_name my_app.com;
  root /home/my_user/my_app_path/current/public;
  passenger_ruby /home/my_user/.rbenv/shims/ruby;
  passenger_enabled on;
  passenger_min_instances 2;
  passenger_max_requests 5000;

  rails_env production;

  #... some more config settings

}
passenger_pre_start http://my_app.com;