500's, timeouts, and redirect loops with Radiant (a RoR CMS)

Question

I'm struggling to get a simple CMS website up and running but can't get past the installation stage. I've been working on this off and on over 4 days and am getting burnt out and demotivated on the project.

To summerise my pains: I keep getting Redirect loops and FCGI timeouts no matter what I do. Unfortunatly I've never touched Ruby, RoR apps, or CGI so I lack the debugging experience to figure this out.

Some details

• Host: Godaddy Shared Linux, SSH access, Non-java server
• Ruby version: 2.2.2
• Gem version: 1.8 (manually set per Help)
• Hosting root for all my sites is /var/chroot/home/content/i/h/a/[name]/html/ . This does have an .htaccess file but it doesn't affect anything
• My domain points to /var/chroot/home/content/i/h/a/[name]/html/ radiant.domain.biz/public/

You have the following two errors that occur. This occurs with the default .htaccess file:

[Wed Oct 20 16:39:13 2010] [error] [client [ip]] mod_rewrite: maximum number of internal redirects reached. Assuming configuration error. Use 'RewriteOptions MaxRedirects' to increase the limit if neccessary.

This is a stock .htaccess thats even recommended on other sites, so the loop really confuses me. No idea why, and I've pretty much given up on why since I don't have access to a rewrite log and I don't have a necessary dev environment setup due to limited resources.

So I modified it and just put RewriteBase / right after the rewrite engine turns on and got this:

[Wed Oct 20 16:40:25 2010] [error] [client [ip]] FastCGI: comm with (dynamic) server "/var/chroot/home/content/i/h/a/[name]/html/radiant.domain.biz/public/dispatch.fcgi" aborted: (first read) idle timeout (60 sec)

[Wed Oct 20 16:40:25 2010] [error] [client [ip]] FastCGI: incomplete headers (0 bytes) received from server "/var/chroot/home/content/i/h/a/[name]/html/radiant.domain.biz/public/dispatch.fcgi"

I assume that means its just partially working but somethings wrong when starting up. I've verified my database.yml settings and they are all good. I've tested when in dev and production mode to no avail, and the log files are all empty.

The only thing I can think of that might of done something is a bug I tried to manually fix an error I encountered when trying to install. I did manage to fix it by following the guide here, but it may of broken something. I'm not sure what though.

This really confuses me as I've never dealt with this kind of error before. So for my question: What would cause this kind of error and how can I fix it?

Answer 1

FCGI is not recommended, and is very uncommon on linux. This is a sign that godaddy may not be a viable Rails host. There is much evidence to back up this claim. Please read this thread: http://www.sitepoint.com/forums/showthread.php?t=666111. There are many others like it. Google searches for 'rails godaddy' bring up mostly people having problems.

I'd seriously think about switching to a more Rails-aware host, or if you really are locked in to a hosting company where hosting is not their primary business, consider one of their pushbutton CMS installations (likely PHP-based).

The only other thing I can think of to try is running a more common standalone rails server like Mongrel and setting up a reverse proxy to it, but I'm not sure if godaddy will have the means for you to do that.

Answer 2

If you really want to use Radiant, you could look at using Heroku, they are a Rails could hosting platform, with a free product that is more than capable of handling a Radiant installation. I use just such a setup for my personal website.

They have a quick quide to getting Radiant setup on a heroku account at http://blog.heroku.com/archives/2009/3/26/radiant_cms_in_5_minutes_or_less/

Obviously you'll need to get sorted with a Heroku account first, but that's pretty simple as well.

I really wouldn't use GoDaddy as a hosting provider if you can at all avoid it, and I don't really see any reason why you can't move hoster. Even if you have a domain registered through them you can still host your site somewhere else, that's exactly what I do.