can anyone give a quick explaination...

rubyonrails-talk
1

Hey all!

I've got an app on a shared host at the moment.

They load ruby gems into a dir onto my space: home/myusername/ruby/ gems/gems and recommend that you include this path by adding it to the load_path like so:

$:.push("home/myusername/ruby/gems/gems")

My question is - is this the same as adding

config.load_paths += %w(home/myusername/ruby/gems/gems)

to the environment.rb file?

If so - cool! If not, can anyone explain what the difference is?

Thanks

2

Hey all!

I've got an app on a shared host at the moment.

They load ruby gems into a dir onto my space: home/myusername/ruby/ gems/gems and recommend that you include this path by adding it to the load_path like so:

$:.push("home/myusername/ruby/gems/gems")

My question is - is this the same as adding

config.load_paths += %w(home/myusername/ruby/gems/gems)

to the environment.rb file?

If so - cool! If not, can anyone explain what the difference is?

No - $: (and the various other names it has) is using by ruby when you write require 'foo'

config.load_paths (which eventually gets stored in ActiveSupport::Dependencies.load_paths) is the set of paths that is searched by rails' magic loading stuff.

Fred

3

Alrighty - thanks Fred

Out of curiosity Fred - do you or anyone else reading have much experience with using RMagick on a shared host?

Having a major headache trying to get rails to load the RMagick gem and my host's technical help are not being so helpful

Thanks

Gavin

4

Not 100% sure what the difference is, but they're both WRONG. Adding gem directories like that to the load path will only work for suitably small values of "work". Try the instructions here:

http://blog.juliankamil.com/article/26/installing-your-own-ruby-gems-in-a-shared-hosting-environment

to get this set up *correctly*. It might not seem like a big deal at first, but the method recommended by your provider will break if gems depend on other gems in your local repository.

--Matt Jones