# Getting 500 Errors on production

**URL:** <https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/getting-500-errors-on-production/167187>\
**Category:** Rails\
**Created:** [May 5, 2009, 8:01am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/getting-500-errors-on-production/167187 "2009-05-05T08:01:05Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 7\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![mikec](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/m/977dab/32.png) [@mikec](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/mikec)\
**Post date:** [May 5, 2009, 8:01am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/getting-500-errors-on-production/167187/1 "2009-05-05T08:01:05Z")

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I’m getting 500 errors on my production server running Passenger. I  
cannot, for the life of me, find out what the problem is. Everything  
works fine on my local machine. However, on my production machine, I  
can’t even get logs since I don’t know where Passenger keeps the logs.  
So I’m scrolling through the production.log on the production server,  
which seems to be endless. Is there an easier way to find out what  
went wrong?

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**Author:** ![mikec](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/m/977dab/32.png) [@mikec](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/mikec)\
**Post date:** [May 5, 2009, 1:47pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/getting-500-errors-on-production/167187/2 "2009-05-05T13:47:54Z")

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Use tail command to see the last line changes of your production.log  
file.

“tail -f log/production.log”

Reproduce the error again. Now you can see the actual error in the log  
file.

On Tue, May 5, 2009 at 11:30 AM, Mike C [removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid](mailto:removed_email_address@domain.invalid) wrote:

> I’m getting 500 errors on my production server running Passenger. I  
> cannot, for the life of me, find out what the problem is. Everything  
> works fine on my local machine. However, on my production machine, I  
> can’t even get logs since I don’t know where Passenger keeps the logs.  
> So I’m scrolling through the production.log on the production server,  
> which seems to be endless. Is there an easier way to find out what  
> went wrong?
> 
> >

–  
With regards,  
Arunkumar B.  
9789980534.  
[http://thinkingrails.blogspot.com](http://thinkingrails.blogspot.com)

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![mikec](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/m/977dab/32.png) [@mikec](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/mikec)\
**Post date:** [May 5, 2009, 4:20pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/getting-500-errors-on-production/167187/3 "2009-05-05T16:20:43Z")

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What platform/OS are you using for production? What database. Inquiring  
minds want to know. 🙂  
Cheers–

Charles

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![mikec](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/m/977dab/32.png) [@mikec](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/mikec)\
**Post date:** [May 5, 2009, 7:36pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/getting-500-errors-on-production/167187/4 "2009-05-05T19:36:39Z")

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Hi, the problem has been fixed but I was basically shooting in the  
dark and happened to get a hit. I’m using Debian 5.0 with MySQL 5 for  
my production. How does Passenger keep its logs, if any?

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![mikec](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/m/977dab/32.png) [@mikec](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/mikec)\
**Post date:** [May 5, 2009, 9:37pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/getting-500-errors-on-production/167187/5 "2009-05-05T21:37:51Z")

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Try your apache error logs, as well as your system logs.  
Cheers–

Charles

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![mikec](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/m/977dab/32.png) [@mikec](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/mikec)\
**Post date:** [May 5, 2009, 10:03pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/getting-500-errors-on-production/167187/6 "2009-05-05T22:03:05Z")

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I did take a look in my apache logs and it only seemed to log  
warnings; I didn’t see anything that pertained to the error or  
exception I got.

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![mikec](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/m/977dab/32.png) [@mikec](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/mikec)\
**Post date:** [May 5, 2009, 10:55pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/getting-500-errors-on-production/167187/7 "2009-05-05T22:55:49Z")

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Try the Phusion site and see if the online docs are helpful. I have  
always  
been able to diagnose problems with the rails log files coupled with the  
apache logs. Sorry. ☹  
Cheers–

Charles