Unable to access log file. Please ensure that path/to/production.log exists and is writable

Question

I am facing the following issue to start a Rails application with Apache - Passenger in Azure platform (CentOS):

App 18106 stdout:
App 18106 stderr: Rails Error:
Unable to access log file. Please ensure that /path/to/production.log exists and is writable (ie, make it writable for user and group: chmod 0664 /path/to/production.log).
The log level has been raised to WARN and the output directed to STDERR until the problem is fixed.

App 18106 stdout:
[ 2017-06-19 11:37:13.5635 18014/7f7826db7700 age/Cor/App/Implementation.cpp:304 ]: Could not spawn process for application /var/www/my_rails_app: An error occurred while starting up the preloader.
Error ID: f684beca
Error details saved to: /tmp/passenger-error-JB9Dio.html
Message from application: could not connect to server: Permission denied
    Is the server running on host "localhost" (::1) and accepting
    TCP/IP connections on port 5432?
could not connect to server: Permission denied
    Is the server running on host "localhost" (127.0.0.1) and accepting
    TCP/IP connections on port 5432?
(PG::ConnectionBad)
/usr/local/rvm/gems/ruby-2.3.1/gems/activerecord-4.2.7.1/lib/active_record/connection_adapters/postgresql_adapter.rb:654:in `initialize'
/usr/local/rvm/gems/ruby-2.3.1/gems/activerecord-4.2.7.1/lib/active_record/connection_adapters/postgresql_adapter.rb:654:in `new'
/usr/local/rvm/gems/ruby-2.3.1/gems/activerecord-4.2.7.1/lib/active_record/connection_adapters/postgresql_adapter.rb:654:in `connect'
/usr/local/rvm/gems/ruby-2.3.1/gems/activerecord-4.2.7.1/lib/active_record/connection_adapters/postgresql_adapter.rb:242:in `initialize'

I have tried chmod 0664 /path/to/production.log but nothing changed in the error as specified above.

The same setup is working fine in AWS.

Apache conf.d files:

/etc/httpd/conf.d/my_app.conf:

<VirtualHost *:80>
  ServerName localhost
  DocumentRoot /var/www
  ErrorLog logs/rails_app_error_log
  <Directory "/var/www/">
          Allow from all
          Options -MultiViews
  </Directory>

  Alias /my_rails_app /var/www/my_rails_app/public/
  <Location /my_rails_app>
          PassengerBaseURI /my_rails_app
          PassengerAppRoot /var/www/my_rails_app
  </Location>
  <Directory /var/www/my_rails_app/public/ >
          Options Indexes ExecCGI FollowSymLinks MultiViews
          Order allow,deny
          Allow from all
          AllowOverride all
  </Directory>
  <IfModule mod_passenger.c>
    PassengerUser  apache
    PassengerGroup apache
  </IfModule>
</VirtualHost>

/etc/httpd/conf.d/passenger.conf:

LoadModule passenger_module /usr/lib64/httpd/modules/mod_passenger.so
 <IfModule mod_passenger.c>
   PassengerRoot /usr/local/rvm/gems/ruby-2.3.1/gems/passenger-5.1.2
   PassengerDefaultRuby /usr/local/rvm/gems/ruby-2.3.1/wrappers/ruby
 </IfModule>

I have also set chown -R apache:apache my_rails_app.

Note: If I run Passenger in standalone mode without using Apache, then everything works just fine.

I have searched all other relevant posts and tried to avoid the could not connect to server: Permission denied in the log, but nothing seems to be working.

Solution:

I think the issue was with SElinux and issue got resolved after running the following command:

/usr/sbin/setsebool -P httpd_can_network_connect 1

At a guess, `logs/rails_app_error_log` is not resolving to where you think it is on the CentOS box. Does /var/www/logs exist? — mcfinnigan, Jun 19 '17 at 12:52
@mcfinnigan : `/var/www/my_rails_app` is the path to my rails app and it has `/var/www/my_rails_app/log/production.log`. Also, the production.log file permissions looks like this: `-rwxrwxrwx. 1 apache apache 14617 Jun 19 10:56 production.log` — dp7, Jun 19 '17 at 13:01

Peter Pan · Answer 1 · 2017-06-20T08:32:18.870

Accoring to the Passenger offical troubleshooting The Rails application reports that it's unable to start because of a permission error for Passenger + Apache and Ruby, I think the issue was caused by the permissions of your Rails application's directory.

So please first check the owner of your apache process via ps -ef|grep apache, then to check the owner & group ownership of your Rails application's directory via ls -l <path of rails>, as below.

$ ps -ef |grep apache
root      7226     1  0 16:10 ?        00:00:00 /usr/sbin/apache2 -k start
www-data  7229  7226  0 16:10 ?        00:00:00 /usr/sbin/apache2 -k start
www-data  7230  7226  0 16:10 ?        00:00:00 /usr/sbin/apache2 -k start
<user>    7756 30915  0 16:12 pts/2    00:00:00 grep --color=auto apache

$ ls -l
total 4
drwxrwxr-x 13 <user> <group> 4096 Jun 20 16:22 myrails

Then try to change the owner & group ownership of your Rails application's directory with root or www-data via chown -R <OWNER>:<GROUP> myrails with root or www-data.

And as reference, there is a similar SO thread What permissions are needed for apache Passenger which you can refer to.

Hope it helps.

Thank you for your inputs. I revisited all relevant paths, changed permission to 755 and user/user groups... now application is started!! — dp7, Jun 20 '17 at 10:28

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Jun 19 '17 at 12:49

0

Run

chmod 777 <directory_with_logs>

This will give you execute/read/write privileges for whole dir. It possible that problem is with directory, not the file.

You can play with the numbers further to finely tune app.

answered Jun 19 '17 at 12:49

Mike Adamenko

2,944
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thank you for your response, I have already tried this but did not work. – dp7 Jun 19 '17 at 12:56

Unable to access log file. Please ensure that path/to/production.log exists and is writable

Solution:

2 Answers2