advice on updating gems

rubyonrails-talk
1

I've just been battling with a deployment to heroku.

The error that stopped me for ages was

"You have already activated rake 0.9.2.2, but your Gemfile requires rake 0.9.2. Using bundle exec may solve this."

I eventually managed to solve this by uninstaling rake 0.9.2 adding rake 0.9.2.2 to my gem file then prompted by the command line a ran: bundle update rake

"bundle update rake" Seemed to do a lot of things I wasn't expecting, going through all gems in the app, updating / installing newer versions of them. This did solve the deployment problem, but I noticed the printout from heroku indicated a lot of new installs of gems on the server as well, updating to newer versions.

So far I haven't noticed anything going wrong, but the fact that so many gems have been updated / re installed worries me.

How do people go about making sure that when rails decides to update everything things don't break? I've definitely had new versions of gems break apps before.

I've read that some processes depend on earlier versions of rake, can anywhere tell me what depends on this, so I can check if it's going to break things?

Any advice / approaches on the constant update turmoil would really be appreciated

2

The command you ran doesn't do what you think it does. It actually just ignored "rake" in the arguments and updated *all* your dependencies to their latest versions.

From the bundler help:

bundle update(1) bundle-update.1.html               Update dependencies to their latest versions

In the future, just continue to manage your gem versions in your gemfile as always specifying min, max, or fixed versions as needed. However, instead of running "bundle update", just run "bundle install" and it will pick up your changes and apply them.

I would also recommend giving RVM a try if you're not using it already. With RVM you have the ability to create gemsets for each of your apps and run multiple versions of ruby on the same machine. This helps avoid conflicts when you're working in multiple projects or multiple versions of a project.

One other really nice benefit is that you can easily empty/clean out your gemset and rebuild it from your gemfile if you ever get in a situation like this on your local dev box.

RVM https://rvm.beginrescueend.com/

Gemsets https://rvm.beginrescueend.com/gemsets/