Trouble Freezing Rails

rubyonrails-talk
1

I have a Rails app that is currently running in production on Rails v1.2.2. Since I didn't have control of the server that runs the production copy of this app, I have put off upgrading to v2.x. However, I recently read about freezing Rails to your app, making it independent of the version of Rails installed on the server so I upgraded my app to v2.3.4. On my development machine everything worked great after freezing Rails to my upgraded app, (presumably because I have Rails v2.3.4 installed locally). As a test of the freezing process, I copied my frozen app to an old PC that only has Rails v2.0.2 installed and tried starting up a Mongrel server . This is unsuccessful, and causes the following error...

E:/Ruby/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/rubygem.rb:246: in 'activate': can't activate actionpack (= 2.0.2), already activated actionpack-2.3.4] (Gem::Exception)

If I go to the gems directory on this box and rename the actionpack-2.0.2 directory (such as adding a -) and try starting mongrel again I get a similar error message...

E:/Ruby/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/rubygem.rb:246: in 'activate': can't activate rails (= 2.0.2), already activated rails-2.3.4] (Gem::Exception)

I checked my controllers for includes that might be causing this, but nothing seemed suspicious (only includes were for 'date', 'net/http', and 'uri') Any help with this would be greatly appreciated. Freezing seemed so straightforward, don't know why it's causing me so many problems.

Thanks for any nuggets of insight / wisdom that come my way...

2

If you post the rest of the backtrace, it will be much more helpful. The activation is coming from *somewhere*, so the trace will show that.

--Matt Jones

3

Thanks for the reply Matt,

Unfortunately, I cannot post more of the backtrace because I am unable to reproduce the same error now that I have made progress on this problem. I did the following on the machine with Rails 2.0.2 on it and all works well there now.

-updated rubygems from 0.9.4 to 1.3.5 and updated all gems that rubygems-update-1.3.5 depends on (builder, session, hoe-seattlerb, minitest, hoe) -installed rack gem 1.0.1

My next hurdle is to attempt freezing all of these gems and forcing rubygems-update to be loaded on my production app. I was thinking of doing this by adding a 'require' into dispatch.fcgi but I'm not sure if this is wise or if it'll even work at all.

Of course I welcome any advice anyone has...

4

If you don't control the server and the Rubygems version is old, you're pretty much out of luck. The only way around it is to compile a new Ruby and Rubygems from source and tell your app to use that. You'll probably want to check with whoever *does* control the server about the availability of the compiler toolchain before trying that (on Site5, they needed to add you to a special "compiler" group, for instance).

--Matt Jones