Invalid command 'PassengerAppRoot', perhaps misspelled or defined by a module not included in the server configuration

Question

I have followed every step for installation given in Installing Passenger + Apache on a Linux/Unix production server for Node.js apps + Red Hat 6 / CentOS 6 (with RPM) and everything worked but when I am trying to configure my subdomain in virtualhost on my centos 6 server using WHM to host my botkit bot, I get this error :

The “/usr/local/apache/bin/httpd” command (process 27088) reported error number 1 when it ended. Configuration problem detected on line 9 of file /usr/local/apache/conf/includes/post_virtualhost_2.conf.tmp: Invalid command 'PassengerAppRoot', perhaps misspelled or defined by a module not included in the server configuration --- /usr/local/apache/conf/includes/post_virtualhost_2.conf.tmp --- 3 ServerAlias subdomain.mydomain.com 4 ServerAdmin [email protected] 5 6 7 # Tell Apache and Passenger where your app's code directory is 8 DocumentRoot /var/www/MyApp/Code/public 9 ===> PassengerAppRoot /var/www/MyApp/Code <=== 10 #Error logging 11 ErrorLog logs/subdomain-error_log 12 CustomLog logs/subdomain-access_log common 13 14 # Tell Passenger that your app is a Node.js app 15 PassengerAppType node --- /usr/local/apache/conf/includes/post_virtualhost_2.conf.tmp ---

Here is my configuration:

<VirtualHost *:80>
    ServerName www.subdomain.mydomain.com
    ServerAlias subdomain.mydomain.com
    ServerAdmin [email protected]


    # Tell Apache and Passenger where your app's code directory is
    DocumentRoot /var/www/MyApp/code/public
    PassengerAppRoot /var/www/MyApp/code
    #Error logging
     ErrorLog logs/votebot-error_log
     CustomLog logs/votebot-access_log common

    # Tell Passenger that your app is a Node.js app
    PassengerAppType node
    PassengerStartupFile bot.js

    # Relax Apache security settings
    <Directory /var/www/MyApp/code/public>
      Allow from all
      Options -MultiViews
      # Uncomment this if you're on Apache >= 2.4:
      #Require all granted
    </Directory>
</VirtualHost>

I tried to remove the configuration and pass via .htaccess :

PassengerEnabled on
PassengerAppRoot /var/www/MyApp/code
SetEnv NODE_ENV production
SetEnv NODE_PATH /usr/lib/node_modules
PassengerAppType node
PassengerStartupFile bot.js

But still it is not working. I checked lately and got the following message when validating passenger :

 * Checking whether this Passenger install is in PATH... ✓
 * Checking whether there are no other Passenger installations... (!)

   You are currently validating against Phusion Passenger 5.1.8, located in:

     /usr/bin/passenger

   Besides this Passenger installation, the following other
   Passenger installations have also been detected:

     /usr/local/rvm/gems/ruby-2.4.1/bin/passenger

   Please uninstall these other Passenger installations to avoid
   confusion or conflicts.

The problem is I don't know what are the steps to uninstall /usr/local/rvm/gems/ruby-2.4.1/bin/passenger .

Answer 1

That error means that the Passenger module hasn't been loaded with a LoadModule passenger_module /path/to/.../passenger/buildout/apache2/mod_passenger.so line in your apache config before the Passenger config options are specified.

If sudo /usr/bin/passenger-config validate-install passed the apache config test, then you have multiple apache configs and the wrong one is being loaded when you get the error.

From your error the conf is at /usr/local/apache/conf/, look for any LoadModule lines in the config with fgrep -RH LoadModule /usr/local/apache/conf/ and add a line to load the Passenger module.