Phusion Passenger – fixing “No such file or directory – git ls-files”

I’ve spent several hours trying to get my rails app successfully deployed using capistrano to a phusion passenger environment, and it was all going well… except for the fact that the application wouldn’t actually run. I kept running into “No such file or directory – git ls-files”. After quite a bit of reading around I finally found this discussion which helped a lot: http://code.google.com/p/phusion-passenger/issues/detail?id=505

There are a number of fixes discussed there. The one that finally worked for me was to run
ln -nfs /usr/local/bin/git /usr/bin/git
since apparently where CentOS puts git and where the passenger code expects to find it are different. With that, everything worked fine.

I cannot decide whether it’s frustrating or gratifying to fix hours worth of stymieing with a single, simple command.