Phusion Passenger / Apache Not Running Correctly on Mac OSX Maverick

Question

After updating to OS X Maverick on my MacBook, my local dev environment was broken - Apache httpd.h file missing on MacOSX after Mavericks Upgrade (** Updated for Yosemite **)

Now after resolving the issues I can't seem to run my local web server on port 80 (localhost).

If I go to 'localhost' I see It works! which is the default apache page.

If I run passenger start I can view my app at localhost:3000 but that's a passenger standalone web server running, not apache.

If I run sudo passenger start -p 80 --user=martin I get the message:

The address 0.0.0.0:80 is already in use by another process,
perhaps another Phusion Passenger Standalone instance.

If you want to run this Phusion Passenger Standalone instance on another port,
use the -p option, like this:

passenger start -p 81

I can't remember what I did when I first set up Rails on my laptop, I'm sure I ran passenger start at the very beginning and didn't need to do it after that and from reading more about it online, apache should run passenger automatically by itself but apache doesn't seem to be doing anything but show the default start page and I don't know why.

I think Maverick created a new httpd.conf but I don't see much difference, I have made sure that the three extra lines running passenger-install-apache2-module returns is at the end of the config file.

The passenger gem is the latest version, Rails version is 2.3.14 and ruby is 1.8.7 so quite old but shouldn't matter I don't think as it worked perfectly on localhost before without having to add port 3000 to the url so just hoping someone with a bit more experience of using Passenger can help.

I've tried reading loads of other questions and forums and also the Phusion Apache documentation. `

Answer 1

I had the same problem. I restored the previous httpd.conf file in /etc/apache2. The file had been renamed httpd.conf.pre-update. I restarted the server with apachectl restart and all was fine again.

Answer 2

I checked the differences between the old and new httpd.conf files, and they were very small (but crucial):

1) The line to include virtual hosts was commented out. 2) The line to include the PHP module was commented out.

I uncommented both lines and problem solved.