Problems running Ruby on Rails apps on shared hosted server

Question

I have problems installing any Ruby On Rails app on my shared hosted server. Mongrel shows html as plain text for all pages. The problem occurs for any app, even if I create a test empty app and add a scaffolded view without changing anything.

It appears that the Mongrel crashes when trying to put cookies to the response header. The HTTP header looks incomplete, the Content-type and other parameters are missing:

curl 127.0.0.1:12002/users -I
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Connection: close
Date: Wed, 26 May 2010 09:46:50 GMT
Content-Length: 0

Here is the output from mongrel.log

Error calling Dispatcher.dispatch #<NoMethodError: You have a nil object when you didn't expect it!
You might have expected an instance of ActiveRecord::Base.
The error occurred while evaluating nil.[]>
/usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/mongrel-1.1.5/bin/../lib/mongrel/cgi.rb:108:in `send_cookies'
/usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/mongrel-1.1.5/bin/../lib/mongrel/cgi.rb:136:in `out'
/usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/mongrel-1.1.5/bin/../lib/mongrel/http_response.rb:65:in `start'

ruby 1.8.7 rails 2.3.8 mongrel 1.1.5

Here is the link to the test page.

Has anyone seen anything like this?

Answer 1

Yes, my apps that worked ok with rails 2.3.5 and mongrel (and mongrel_cluster / pen) will fail with rails 2.3.8. For me it seems rails cannot put data in session (db:sessions) any more, so my login will always fail. See also here.

Answer 2

I'm also seeing this. Upgraded 2.3.5 apps to 2.3.8.

Using mongrel, behind apache 2.2.3.

Running with webrick or thin locally works fine, using mongrel does not.

Answer 3

I can confirm this. I upgraded a very new Rails app from 2.3.5 to 2.3.8, running Mongrel 1.1.5 on Windows. Any requests going through the router (ie: not static files in /public) cause this error to happen.

Answer 4

got the same, ruby 1.8.7, rails 2.3.8, mongrel 1.3.5. strange cuz works fine on localhost but on hosting I have ActionController::InvalidAuthenticityToken issues

Answer 5

I posted a solution here:

https://rails.lighthouseapp.com/projects/8994/tickets/4690

Let me know if it works for you.

Thanks, Mike C

Answer 6

Hello,

In my case, this exact problem occurred when running mongrel with the "mongrel_rails" command. Using "script/server" command (which also launches mongrel if it's present) solved the issue.

Maybe you could write to your webhosting provider to check on this.