Rails Error

When you get an error stating 'Rails application failed to start properly' it means there was a critical failure somewhere in your Rails application. Information about this error can be found in one of two places:

• Error Log section of your control panel

• 'RAILS_APP/log/' (the log directory for your Rails application)

Usually there is more useful information in the Rails log directory than in the error logs section of your control panel. There are several files in there depending on the mode you are in. If you're using the FastCGI wrapper, you'll want the fastcgi.crash.log. If you're using the regular CGI, it's one of the other logs, depending on the mode you're in.

Common errors include incorrect database settings or bugs in your code.

It's recommended that you use the regular CGI for the application, rather than FastCGI, during development. FastCGI often takes some time to show the error page when something fails, so the CGI can give you faster responses to your code changes. However, if you run your app through CGI (rather than FCGI), Rails has to restart on every request which can really increase your load times. FastCGI doesn't restart Rails every time a page is loaded. But if you make changes to your code while running on FastCGI they won't take effect until after Rails has been restarted.