Rails 2.0 causing startup errors for some customers
After upgrading our servers to Rails 2.0 it has come to our attention this has caused problems for some customers rails applications where the application will fail to start. This will happen when your application is not set to use a specific version of rails and will therefor load the most recent version of rails. On servers where customers have been affected we have removed rails 2.0. This is a temporary measure to give customers time to upgrade their applications. We will be reinstalling rails 2.0 on all servers on Friday 14th December. Read on to see how to make sure your rails application will still work after the upgrade.
We are advising all customers to either specifically set the rails version to use in your environment or freeze your rails gems. To set the rails environment in your config edit the config/environment.rb file and un-comment or add the following line:
RAILS_GEM_VERSION = ‘1.2.6′
To freeze your rails gems run the following command from your rails application root:
rake rails:freeze:gems
This will copy all of the files needed to run rails into your vendor/rails directory. If you need to freeze to a specific version of rails run the following command:
rake rails:freeze:edge TAG=rel_1-2-6
You may also need to include your other gems within your application, there is an excellent article by Chris Wanstrath called vendor everything that covers how and why you should do this.
Lastly, anyone wanting to upgrade their current application to rails 2.0 should first upgrade to rails version 1.2.6 and check for any depreciation warnings before making the leap to rails 2.0. Also watch out for the code that has been removed from rails and is available in plugin form!
