Phusion Passenger and Static Sites

Phusion Passenger (aka ModRails) is a great way to run Rails apps from Apache. You add a couple of lines of Passenger configuration to your apache config file and create a VirtualHost for your application. Passenger does its thing behind the scenes and everything works fine.

But if you want to run a totally static web site as a VirtualHost on the same server as a Passenger-managed Rails app you need some way of telling Passenger what you are doing.

In your VirtualHost block for the Static site add a 'PassengerEnabled off' line:

<virtualhost>
  PassengerEnabled off
  ServerName  mysite.com
  DocumentRoot /home/jones/public_html/mysite.com/html
</virtualhost>

You will need to restart Apache as well.