Managing Your Mongrel

From OCS Support Wiki

Contents 1 Introduction 2 Restarting Mongrel 2.1 Problems Restarting Your Mongrel 3 Using Cron to Automatically Restart Mongrel

Introduction

This guide will show you how to restart your Mongrel, and if desired, use cron to automatically restart it.

Restarting Mongrel

Run the following commands via SSH:

cd ~/rails_sites/yourapp
mongrel_rails restart

Replace rails_sites/yourapp with the location of your Rails application.

Problems Restarting Your Mongrel

If you see an error message similar to this:

!!! PID file log/mongrel.pid does not exist. Not running?
mongrel::restart reported an error. Use mongrel_rails
mongrel::restart -h to get help.

Then please check the following:

• Are you using Mongrel? If you're using Lighttpd, FastCGI, or CGI mode, the mongrel_rails restart method won't work. Just run killall -9 ruby dispatch.fcgi dispatch.cgi to restart your FastCGI application.
• Your Mongrel may not be running. Start the mongrel with the usual start command you use (i.e. mongrel_rails start -e production -p 60000 -d).

Using Cron to Automatically Restart Mongrel

On both cPanel and Webmin, you can use cron to schedule an automatic restart of your Mongrel. To do so, via SSH, run:

crontab -e

You'll be presented with an editor (usually nano) to edit your cron jobs. Add the line:

@daily cd ~/rails_sites/yourapp ; mongrel_rails restart

to it, replacing rails_sites/yourapp with the path to your Rails application. You can change @daily to @hourly if your Rails app needs to be restarted more frequently.

Don't forget to exit and save the file to apply the changes (in nano, press CTRL+X, hit enter, and this will save and exit).