[DRE-maint] Bug#846052: passenger-config/status cannot find instance registry

[Martin von Wittich]

On Mon, 28 Nov 2016 07:40:10 +0000 Matijs van Zuijlen 
<matijs at matijs.net> wrote:
> I have just upgraded to passenger 5, and now I want to restart my
> application the 'new' way by using passenger-config. I have tried this
> both through capistrano, and on the command line, and I get the
> following error message:
> 
>    *** ERROR: Phusion Passenger doesn't seem to be running. If you are sure that it
>   is running, then the causes of this problem could be one of:

I just upgraded our Redmine installation to Debian stretch, and I have 
the same issue. I believe this is caused by the PrivateTmp feature of 
systemd (PrivateTmp=true is set in /lib/systemd/system/apache2.service), 
because while passenger-status is looking in /tmp, Apache is storing the 
instance registry dir in /tmp/systemd-private-...:

redmine.iserv.eu ~ # ll 
/tmp/systemd-private-df0217594fc94127b16c17b45a99716c-apache2.service-Q1WevN/tmp
total 72K
drwxr-xr-x 3 www-data www-data 4.0K Aug 15 18:49 bundler/
drwxr-xr-x 4 root     root     4.0K Aug 15 18:49 passenger.U9uCrRI/
-rw------- 1 www-data www-data    0 Aug 15 18:52 
RackMultipart20170815-1192-8063mg
-rw------- 1 www-data www-data    0 Aug 15 18:56 
RackMultipart20170815-1192-8qsxi
-rw------- 1 www-data www-data    0 Aug 15 18:53 
RackMultipart20170815-1192-v5lfb6
-rw------- 1 root     root      30K Aug 15 18:56 passenger-error-24wMBJ.html
-rw------- 1 root     root      30K Aug 15 18:49 passenger-error-GwQoka.html

I have resolved this as follows:

1) Create 
/etc/systemd/system/apache2.service.d/passenger-instance-reg.conf with 
the following contents:

[Service]
ExecStartPre=/bin/mkdir -p /run/passenger
ExecStopPost=/bin/rmdir --ignore-fail-on-non-empty /run/passenger

2) systemctl daemon-reload

3) Add the following to your Apache configuration:

# https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=846052
PassengerInstanceRegistryDir /run/passenger

4) Add the following to your /etc/environment:

# https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=846052
PASSENGER_INSTANCE_REGISTRY_DIR=/run/passenger

5) restart Apache and reconnect (SSH) or re-login (local). Opening a new 
shell is not enough, because /etc/environment is only read by PAM. 
passenger-status should work now.

-- 
Mit freundlichen Grüßen
Martin v. Wittich

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