On Systemd-based distributions such as Red Hat 7, Apache likely runs with PrivateTmp. Because of this, passenger-status cannot access the instance registry directory without explicit configuration.
There is no other obvious default directory we can use. /var/run is not world-writable. /var/tmp is not cleared on reboot, though this may not matter if passenger-status cleans up stale directories.
So the next best thing to do, is to autodetect PrivateTmp, and if it is used, ask the user to configure an explicit instance registry directory outside /tmp.
PrivateTmp works by creating a directory /tmp/systemd-private-XXXX, and spawning the process with /tmp private mounted to that directory. This directory is accessible by the target user only.
I have considered making passenger-status and related tools to look inside PrivateTmp directories too, but that requires root privileges, which conflicts with the desire to allow 'passenger-config restart-app' to work without root privileges (see #1392).
On Systemd-based distributions such as Red Hat 7, Apache likely runs with PrivateTmp. Because of this, passenger-status cannot access the instance registry directory without explicit configuration.
There is no other obvious default directory we can use. /var/run is not world-writable. /var/tmp is not cleared on reboot, though this may not matter if passenger-status cleans up stale directories.
So the next best thing to do, is to autodetect PrivateTmp, and if it is used, ask the user to configure an explicit instance registry directory outside /tmp.
PrivateTmp works by creating a directory /tmp/systemd-private-XXXX, and spawning the process with /tmp private mounted to that directory. This directory is accessible by the target user only.
I have considered making passenger-status and related tools to look inside PrivateTmp directories too, but that requires root privileges, which conflicts with the desire to allow 'passenger-config restart-app' to work without root privileges (see #1392).