I wrote a demo HelloWorld Rails app and tested it with WEBrick (it doesn't even use a DB, it's just a controller which prints "hello world"). Then I tried to deploy it to a local Apache powered with Passenger. In fact this test is just to get Passenger working (it's my first deploy on Apache). Now I'm not even sure that Passenger works, but I don't get any error on the Apache side.
When I fire http://rails.test/ the browser shows the Rails 500 error page - so I assume that Passenger works. I want to investigate the logs, but it happens that production.log is empty! I don't think it's a permission problem, because if I delete the file, it is recreated when I reload the page. I tried to change the log level in conf/environments/production.rb, tried to manually write to log file with Rails console production and
Rails.logger.error('asdf')
it returns true but nothing gets written to production.log. The path (obtained per Rails.logger.inspect) is correct, and I remark that the file is recreated if I manually remove it. How can I know what's going on?
(I already checked the Apache logs, plus I set the highest debug level for Passenger but it seems a Rails problem, so is not logged by the server)
Assuming you're running Rails 3.2.1, this is a bug. It was patched in 3.2.2.
If you can't upgrade to 3.2.2 for any reason, this comment on GitHub has a workaround:
# config/initializers/patch_rails_production_logging.rb
Rails.logger.instance_variable_get(:@logger).instance_variable_get(:@log_dest).sync = true if Rails.logger