# 500 Server Error when running dispatch.\* **URL:** \ **Category:** Rails\ **Created:** [November 12, 2005, 12:50pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/500-server-error-when-running-dispatch/47694 "2005-11-12T12:50:09Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 4\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![richard](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/r/f0a364/32.png) [@richard](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/richard)\ **Post date:** [November 12, 2005, 12:50pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/500-server-error-when-running-dispatch/47694/1 "2005-11-12T12:50:09Z")
Hi all, I’m trying to setup an app on Dreamhost but was getting the ‘Rails application failed to start’ message. To track this down, I tried to run the dispatchers directly to see what’s happening. Here’s the output: [fig]$ ./public/dispatch.rb Status: 500 Internal Server Error The site runs fine if I start the server: [fig]$ ./script/server =\> Booting WEBrick… =\> Rails application started on [http://0.0.0.0:3000](http://0.0.0.0:3000) =\> Ctrl-C to shutdown server; call with --help for options [2005-11-11 15:53:33] INFO WEBrick 1.3.1 [2005-11-11 15:53:33] INFO ruby 1.8.2 (2005-04-11) [i386-linux] [2005-11-11 15:53:33] INFO WEBrick::HTTPServer#start: pid=24193 port=3000 Does anyone have any ideas on where to look to track this down further? Thanks in advance. ---
**Author:** ![richard](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/r/f0a364/32.png) [@richard](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/richard)\ **Post date:** [November 12, 2005, 2:00pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/500-server-error-when-running-dispatch/47694/2 "2005-11-12T14:00:13Z")
removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid wrote: > [fig]$ ./public/dispatch.rb > Status: 500 Internal Server Error > … > Does anyone have any ideas on where to look to track this down further? Take a look at log/development.log. ---
**Author:** ![richard](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/r/f0a364/32.png) [@richard](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/richard)\ **Post date:** [November 12, 2005, 2:10pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/500-server-error-when-running-dispatch/47694/3 "2005-11-12T14:10:14Z")
Richard, Can you elaborate a little on what you’ve done so far? Are you using FastCGI? Have you set the path to Ruby in dispatch.(f)cgi? Have you set the permissions of dispatch.(f)cgi to 755? Are you running in production or development mode? If you haven’t explicitly set it to development, you’ll be in production and will need that database configured in your database.yml file. You should mostly run in production mode, btw (see point 3): [http://weblog.textdrive.com/article/175/rails-optimizing-resource-usage](http://weblog.textdrive.com/article/175/rails-optimizing-resource-usage) Here are a couple of resources with lots of info on the above questions. The DreamHost wiki has step-by-step instructions on setting up an app to run there: [http://wiki.dreamhost.com/index.php?title=Ruby\_on\_Rails](http://wiki.dreamhost.com/index.php?title=Ruby_on_Rails) My blog has quite a few articles on running Rails apps at DreamHost: [http://convergentarts.com/](http://convergentarts.com/) Particularly in regard to using FastCGI: [http://convergentarts.com/pages/fastcgi](http://convergentarts.com/pages/fastcgi) Let me know if you’ve tried those things with no luck. -Tom ---
**Author:** ![richard](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/r/f0a364/32.png) [@richard](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/richard)\ **Post date:** [November 13, 2005, 7:08pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/500-server-error-when-running-dispatch/47694/4 "2005-11-13T19:08:07Z")
Tom W. wrote: > [Non-Existent Domain](http://weblog.textdrive.com/article/175/rails-optimizing-resource-usage) > [http://weblog.textdrive.com/article/175/rails-optimizing-resource-usage](http://weblog.textdrive.com/article/175/rails-optimizing-resource-usage) The same error came up on all dispatch files. Including dispatch.rb I’m running the file from the command line, so any problems such as database issues are all usually displayed in the output. That’s what was confusing me here. Running the script directly from the commandline usually gives all the details of whats going wrong. Any issues such as incorrect paths, bad database settings would all be easy to spot. Just outputting ‘500 Server Error’ seemed a bit odd. It seems to be working now though, after no changes by myself. So maybe it was an intermittent error on the server.