You don't have to run your Rails app as root to access it on port 80. Instead, run it normally (on port 3000) and forward port 80 packets via iptables…
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# localhost/loopback sudo iptables -t nat -I OUTPUT -p tcp -d 127.0.0.1 --dport 80 -j REDIRECT --to-ports 3000 # external sudo iptables -t nat -I PREROUTING -p tcp --dport 80 -j REDIRECT --to-ports 3000 |