If you’re wondering if you can still develop on your Mac using Passenger along with the nginx config – the answer is of course you can!

First, follow the installation instructions.

Then you’ll need to edit your /etc/hosts file to tell your host about the virtual domain. (This is only necessary I assume until the fantastic Passenger Preference Pane is updated to work with nginx)

  127.0.0.1  localhost my_facebook_killer.local

Finally, update your nginx.conf, which is pretty much the same as the Passenger installation instructions, with one extra line for development.

  server {
    listen 80;
    server_name my_facebook_killer.local;
    root /path/to/your/rails/app/public;
    passenger_enabled on;
    rails_env development;  # This line tells passenger to start in development mode.
  }

Now restart nginx and you should be able to test your app by hitting http://my_facebook_killer.local in your browser

It seems like just the other day I was bemoaning the fact that in order to run Phusion Passenger, I had to run Apache. Well Happy Birthday to Phusion, today they announced nginx support. No sooner did I read that than I hopped on my server and ripped out Apache for the leaner, sleaker nginx.

Shortly thereafter, I’m up and running again. Fantastic.