Multiple Rails Applications on same server using Passenger. Restarting Apache

Question

I have two Ruby on Rails Web Applications that are running as different Virtual Hosts. They use Apache/Passenger.

My question is that when I update the code on one of the Web Applications, I need to restart Apache in order to make the changes live. Whenever this happens, it restarts the Apache instance which affects the second Ruby on Rails application.

Is there a way to have the new code of my first application go live without affecting the second application? sudo service apache2 restart causes both applications to restart.

Answer 1

Phusion Passenger has two mechanisms to allow you to restart your Rails application.

Check out the Passenger documentation here.

The basic premise is that you should have a tmp directory under the root of your Rails application.

By issuing: touch tmp/restart.txt from within the root of your Rails application, you're telling Passenger to restart the app.