nginx (+ passenger) doesn't seem to run on port 80 [closed] - ruby-on-rails-3

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I have nginx (with passenger) installed on my user account (via homebrew). For a few hours I thought the thing just refuses to work, as I couldn't get any Rails3 application to respond on a simple nginx-declared location. After much deliberation (AKA trial-and-error) I came to conclusion that it does work, but refuses to use port 80.
I know, that a homebrew installation is a per user installation, thus it should not be able to run on root-only ports (ie. ports 1024 and below), but homebrew itself (and various sources on the net) suggest that simply running the server via sudo nginx would suffice to allow it to use port 80.
These are the important files of the configuration that does work:
/etc/hosts:
##
# Host Database
#
# localhost is used to configure the loopback interface
# when the system is booting. Do not change this entry.
##
127.0.0.1 doomhub.local localhost
255.255.255.255 broadcasthost
::1 localhost
fe80::1%lo0 localhost
/usr/local/etc/nginx/nginx.conf:
#user nobody;
worker_processes 1;
events {
worker_connections 1024;
}
http {
passenger_root /Users/ellmo/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.3-p125/gems/passenger-3.0.18/;
passenger_ruby /Users/ellmo/.rvm/rubies/ruby-1.9.3-p125/bin/ruby;
include mime.types;
default_type application/octet-stream;
access_log logs/access.log; #main;
sendfile on;
#tcp_nopush on;
#keepalive_timeout 0;
keepalive_timeout 65;
#gzip on;
server {
server_name doomhub.local;
listen 8080;
root /Users/ellmo/rails/doomhub/public;
passenger_enabled on;
passenger_use_global_queue on;
rails_env development;
}
}
When I change the application's server port to 80, I naturally will - upon restart - receive a:
nginx: [emerg] bind() to 0.0.0.0:80 failed (13: Permission denied)
...but when I sudo it, the error won't show, the process will start with root as its owner. However opening http://doomhub.local in the browser returns nothing (well, technically it's a "browser could not resolve the address" error, but I get no other errors, no nginx error). I get no logs, no nothing.
When I change the listening port back to 8080 (or anything else) it works like a charm when I run it as a regular user... but then I really want to use http://doomhub.local in my browser rather than http://doomhub.local:8080.
Is there anything that would block OSX apps from listening on port 80, that I'm missing? As you can see I CAN use it, so there's no other process in the way. It just doesn't listen to anyhting.
Is there any way to treat 8080 in the browser as a "normal" http port?
EDIT:
Specifying passenger users as Jan Schejbal suggested didn't solve the issue for me, after a while I ended up creating rvm wrappers for passenger (rather than allowing it to use clear ruby binaries) as described in this great post:
http://everydayrails.com/2010/09/13/rvm-project-gemsets.html
Thanks to creating a passenger/bundler-only rvm wrapper I managed to get the application running when I start nginx as root. I can specify both root-only and user-allowed listening ports (ie. I tested both 8080 and 81) and the application is served fine even with all the gems that are NOT related to the wrapper binary. Yet...
...still I get absolutely nothing on port 80.

Answer 1

proper diagnosis
Hah!
I completely forgot I had pow installed on my system. I know I had it disabled altogether before I started playing with nginx, but that was not enough. As you may know pow is a zero-configuration server tool that automatically creates localhost domain - this also means that it... "appropriates" port 80, which you can see if you type:
sudo ipfw list
This should return something like:
00100 fwd 127.0.0.1,20559 tcp from any to me dst-port 80 in
65535 allow ip from any to any
...which clearly shows that any ip connection on port 80 is forwarded to 20559 (pow's port)
solution
What we want do do now is to delete this port-80 forwarding information and use some other port in it's place. That will allow us to easily host development servers for multiple rails applications (each with its own gemset and configuration) and proxy them through passenger's upstreams.
There's a great write-up on how to achieve the first part of this task. To me it seems like simply changing the ipfw entries manually would suffice, but I went with the blog entry. If you do this - make sure you use proper pow install/uninstall scripts from pow's manual; for example I had to fully un-install pow before the installation script would successfully compile.

Answer 2

I'd assume that running as root causes permission problems, causing the app not to work. Have you tried the PassengerUserSwitching option together with PassengerUser and PassengerGroup?
Edit: Missed the "could not resolve address" error. Still try the above (Passenger is weird sometimes), but also try running a netstat to see if the port is correctly bound.