Rails 1.1 Follow Up

In the end DreamHost has uninstalled Rails 1.1 and all other dependencies. An odd move if you ask me since it was more work involved than fixing the upgrade. I think the main issue of contention was that Typo (a Ruby blogging program) doesn’t work with 1.1.

Before that I did manage to get all my sites working properly. There are three main ways to do this:

  1. rake gem_freeze
  2. Copy Rails 1.0 to your vendor directory:
    svn export http://dev.rubyonrails.org/svn/rails/tags/rel_1-0-0 rails
    
    Or do it manually as laid out here.
  3. Or insert the appropriate lines from the wiki to specify certain versions of Rails and its components. This requires your host to have older versions of the gems. A few caveats:
    • Make sure you have require ‘rubygems’
    • Make sure the dependencies come before any lines that need them, e.g.:
      ActiveRecord::Base.configurations = File.open("#{RAILS_ROOT}/config/database.yml") { |f| YAML::load(f) }
      
    • Comment out the default require lines for Rails
Also make sure you kill any old ruby processes so the changes can have an affect. To be honest I used a combination of 2 and 3, I’m fairly certain only one made a difference, and I know which one, but since the site is live and is now working, I’m very reluctant to change anything. As for future Rails hosts, my shortlist is:
  1. OCS Solutions
  2. Planet Aragon
  3. and a distant third, TextDrive

I think I’ll go with OCS Solutions, because they seem very serious about Rails, they support lighttp, I couldn’t find any bad press about them and they’re cheap. DreamHost is good for testing Rails apps, but I definitely wouldn’t recommend them for client hosting.

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2 Responses to “Rails 1.1 Follow Up”

  1. Freeze all your ruby gems on a shared host says:

    […] Update about 18h later: An other solution is to lock down the versions of the gems you use in environment.rb using what suggested on Ruby On Rails Wiki. Thank you, Miles Barr for the tip! […]

  2. Miles Barr » Blog Archive » More Rails on DreamHost Pain says:

    […] I thought I sorted out my problems with my sites needing Rails 1.0 by configuring them to use specific versions of the required gems. But this was short lived, the other day my sites just stopped working. I reported the problem to DreamHost and after a couple days they told me I was trying to use a version of a gem that wasn’t available. The various gems and the versions needed are: […]

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