Rails Machine Wiki

Permission Denied Saving Attachment

The Symptoms

When using image science or other libraries which make use of inline Ruby, you may get an error like this:

Permission denied - /.ruby_inline

you might also notice errors such as:

Expected /var/www/apps/myapp/current/config/../app/models/attachment.rb to define Attachment

The Solution

The problem is that your mongrels are trying to write to a directory they do not have write permissions to. Since your mongrel_cluster runs as deploy, the fix is to make sure ruby_inline will write to a directory that your deploy user does have permission on.

Create the file config/initializers/ruby_inline.rb with the line:

ENV['HOME'] = "/home/deploy" if ENV['RAILS_ENV'] == 'production'

Add the file to svn, commit, and redeploy.