acts_as

Got an e-mail from site5 today saying that Phusion Passenger was going to be upgraded and that I needed to add the directive "PassengerAppRoot /home/user/applicationroot" to my .htaccess file in order for my site to continue working after the upgrade.

I had some issues with the upgrade initially, and figured out that you need to know the correct .htaccess file in order for the directive to not break your site.  My issue was that I put the directive in the base public_html directory .htaccess initially when I first got the e-mail.  This totally hosed my typo blog's admin section, to the point of giving me 404 not found errors.  I later realized that I needed to stick the directive in the .htaccess file that resided in the public directory of my rails application directory as well.  So now everything is working fine (obviously since I'm writing this post....)

Here's a link to a forum post I made for it:

http://forums.site5.com/showthread.php?p=152489#post152489

Getting a rails app working on Site5. After reading a bunch of confusing stuff and going down a lot of dead ends i finally figured out four simple things to getting a rails app running on site5.

Essentially its this:

1. Get the ability to install local gems, with this nice thread.
2. Make an .htaccess file with the only contents being "PassengerEnabled on" in it.
3. Setup the .htaccess file in 'public_html' to follow symlinks
4. Setup a symlink from where your app sits in your account, to a place in 'public_html'

Ok so that list is far from a tutorial but if you want to figure out the symlink stuff go here. I'd ignore the stuff in that thread that doesn't talk about making the symbolic links work, since the Phusion Passenger deployment of rails is far simpler to get a rails app running. Another helpful page is the scripting and development page on site5's wiki as well (though at the time I'm writing this I feel its slightly confusing for a newbie).