Essentially, my route is working perfectly, Passenger seems to be loading - all is hunky-dory. Except that nothing Railsy happens. Here's my Nginx log from starting the server to the first request (ignore the different domain/route - it's because I haven't moved the new domain over yet, and it's returning a 403 error because there's no index file in the public folder):

[ pid=24559 file=ext/nginx/HelperServer.cpp:826 time=2009-11-10 00:49:13.227 ]:
  Passenger helper server started on PID 24559
[ pid=24559 file=ext/nginx/HelperServer.cpp:831 time=2009-11-10 00:49:13.227 ]:
  Password received.
2009/11/10 00:49:53 [error] 24578#0: *1 directory index of "/var/www/***/current/public/" is forbidden, client: 188.221.195.27, server: ***, request: "GET / HTTP/1.1", host: "***"
2009/11/10 00:49:54 [error] 24578#0: *1 open() "/var/www/***/current/public/favicon.ico" failed (2: No such file or directory), client: 188.221.195.27, server: ***, request: "GET /favicon.ico HTTP/1.1", host: "***", referrer: "***"

Someone on the RubyOnRails IRC channel suggested that it might be a webserver permissions problem. I had a suspicion that it might be a filesystem permission problem, but then Nginx runs as www-data and Passenger as root.

I can load static files from within the public directory fine, but no Rails application is being launched. Does anyone have an idea? My head is gradually melting away figuring this one out!

Edit: Here's the vhost file:

server {
        listen       80;
        server_name  ***;
        passenger_enabled on;

        location / {
            root   /var/www/***/current/public;
            index  index.html index.htm;
        }

        #error_page  404              /404.html;

        # redirect server error pages to the static page /50x.html
        #
        error_page   500 502 503 504  /50x.html;
        location = /50x.html {
            root   html;
        }
    }