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.

Can't find the Phusion Passenger Apache module. Visit http://www.modrails.com for installation instructions.

I started receiving this message after upgrading my Phusion Passenger. And possibly other stuff. Rerunning the passenger setup didn’t work. Then, while looking through my httpd.conf file, I found this line near the top:

LoadModule passenger_module /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/passenger-2.0.6/ext/apache2/mod_passenger.so

Which referenced an older version of passenger. Removing that line made things happy again. Of course, I am references the correct version now, down at the bottom of the file.

Having some free time on my hands today, I decided it was time to switch things up on my blog software. So, as of this evening, here’s how things are looking around here.

• Hosted at Mosso. Because the cloud is where it’s at. I wanted my blog in the clouds, too. And cheaper.
• Served by Phusion Passenger. Because Passenger is fantastic for hosting. I was sad to leave Nginx behind and have to return to Apache. But, Passenger was enticing enough.
• Running Ruby 1.9.1. Because it’s time to leave the 1.8.x branch behind.
• Blogging engine provided by Enki. Because I’m a Ruby developer, and this blog engine really speaks to me.

Granted now I need to spend some time cleaning a few things up. But, overall this migration could not have been any easier.