[Answered ]-Problems doing the Django tutorial on Dreamhost using Passengers

Here’s the relevant section of the Passenger user’s guide for restarting Passenger:

http://www.modrails.com/documentation/Users%20guide.html#_redeploying_restarting_the_ruby_on_rails_application

I had the same problem with Passenger not reloading the Django server.

According to Django wiki page on Dreamhost, you can touch a “restart.txt” file that Passenger watches. If the timestamp on the file changes, Passenger restarts Django.

If you modified your application and your changes do not seem to be reflected, you may need to notify Passenger about your change by creating or modifying ~/example.com/tmp/restart.txt:

touch /home/user/example.com/tmp/restart.txt

Source: http://wiki.dreamhost.com/Django#Hints

For the tutorial, you should be working on a local machine, not a web server.