Tweaks to make puppet passenger working

I have been writing a puppet script to create VMs with ruby, rails and passenger recently and encountered quite a few small but annoying problems. Just want to write it down since it may help others.

Environments:

    Ubuntu 14

    Ruby 2.1.7

    Rails 4.2.5

    Passenger 5.0.22

    Puppet 3.4.3

Puppet modules:

    puppetlabs-concat

    puppetlabs-apache

    puppetlabs-passenger

    puppetlabs-apt

    puppetlabs-vcsrepo

1. Problem with puppetlabs/ruby v0.4.0

This module does not support Ruby version 2.2.x, so have to use Ruby '2.1.0'.

2. Problems with puppetlabs/passenger v0.4.1

2.1) Passenger version: to specify the version of passenger, according to the documentation and the example in the README, only passenger_version needs to be set. However, it is NOT working at all. Both passenger_version and package_ensure need to be set, e.g.

class {'passenger':

passenger_version      => "$passenger_version", 

package_ensure          => "$passenger_version", 

passenger_provider     => 'gem',

......

  }  

2.2) RailsAutoDetect: Passenger module adds INVALID 'RailsAutoDetect' into /etc/apache2/mods-enabled/passenger.conf. To fix it:

  file_line { 'Change RailsAutoDetect to PassengerEnabled':

 path => '/etc/apache2/mods-enabled/passenger.conf',  

 line => '        PassengerEnabled On',

 match   => "RailsAutoDetect",

 ......

  }
Update: the puppet passenger module master branch has fixed this bug but has not published to forge as of Jan 2016.

2.3) HTTP 403 error on apps: Passenger module adds 'PassengerHighPerformance On' into /etc/apache2/mods-enabled/passenger.conf. It gives an HTTP 403 error to webapps sitting on a sub path. To fix it:

  file_line { 'Disable PassengerHighPerformance':

 path => '/etc/apache2/mods-enabled/passenger.conf',  

 line => '        PassengerHighPerformance off',

 match   => "PassengerHighPerformance",

 ......

  }
Update: a better choice is to set PassengerHighPerformance off in the <Location xxx> directive.

2.4) Permissions: as the webapp will be running under apache user, you may want to add read permission to 'www-data' group to your webapp path.

3. Copy file from host to VM

Remember to remove carriage returns, for instance:

  file { 'post_config.sh':

    ensure => 'file',

source => "puppet:///modules/my_module/post_config.sh",

path   => '/app_path/post_config.sh',

        ,,,,,,

before  => Exec['Remove_carriage_returns'],

  }

  

  exec { 'Remove_carriage_returns':

    command  => "/bin/sed -i s/\r//g /app_path/post_config.sh",

require  => File['/app_path/post_config.sh'],

  }

4. Cannot create user with password
If you want to use 'user' to create a user with password, by default it WONT work, e.g. the password in /etc/shadow will be EMPTY!
  user { 'user1' :
    ensure   =>  'present',
password =>  'SHA512_PASSWORD'
shell       =>  '/bin/bash',
home     =>  '/home/user1',
managehome => true,
  }
The reason is that a ruby gem 'ruby-shadow' must be installed first! (Thanks to puppet cookbook)
package { 'ruby-shadow':
    ensure   => 'present',
    provider => 'gem',
}