New Rails

March 28, 2006 on 5:57 pm | In New Features, Tech News, Updates by terri |

As I write this, the latest version of Ruby on Rails, version 1.1, is being installed on all DreamHost servers.

When I asked Josh if I could post to the blog about this, he asked me, “Is it exciting?” Pfah! Of course it’s exciting!

For one thing, they’re bragging over at the RoR Blog that the update has over 500 “fixes, tweaks, and features.” I call that pretty darn exciting, and I knew our DreamHost customers who love Ruby on Rails would be excited to get their hot little hands on those changes as soon as possible. The big one that I know will get RoR fans all a-quiver is Ajax. I’ve heard some pretty excited talk about Ajax, and now RoR fans can get their Ajax on.

Additionally, another blogger has published a list of lesser-known features that may not be as exciting as the major changes, but are a nice addition to make life a bit easier for RoR developers.

So maybe nobody will be dancing in the streets over this one, but who knows, maybe a beer or two will be tipped.

49 Responses to “New Rails”

  1. Brian Sweeting Says:
    March 28th, 2006 at 6:16 pm

    You guys rock!

  2. Peter Says:
    March 28th, 2006 at 6:24 pm

    Thanks a lot! But is this why my RoR website is showing 500 Internal Server Error?! hmmm…

  3. Josh Susser Says:
    March 28th, 2006 at 6:30 pm

    Thanks for the heads up. This will probably break every Typo blog being hosted on DreamHost servers, as the Typo blog engine is not yet compatible with Rails 1.1. The Rails team made every effort to make 1.1 backward compatible with 1.0, but some stuff just doesn’t work with 1.1 yet (mostly having to do with plugin architectures).

    This page has a tip on how to tie your Rails app to a specific version of the Rails gems:
    http://wiki.rubyonrails.com/rails/pages/GemRails

    DreamHost, please keep around the 1.0 gems for a while to help ease the transition to 1.1.

  4. Jake Good Says:
    March 28th, 2006 at 6:34 pm

    yikes, I hope things go smoothly for the Typo team… my blog, my precious…

  5. Daniel Morrison Says:
    March 28th, 2006 at 6:51 pm

    It speaks highly of both DreamHost and Ruby on Rails that you are able to make this switch so quickly.

    Thanks much!

  6. Josh Warchol Says:
    March 28th, 2006 at 6:57 pm

    I don’t see the right version of activerecord installed.

    [firestone]$ gem list activerecord
    *** LOCAL GEMS ***
    activerecord (1.13.2)
    Implements the ActiveRecord pattern for ORM.

    [firestone]$ rails testingrailsapp
    /usr/local/lib/site_ruby/1.8/rubygems.rb:194:in `report_activate_error’: RubyGem version error: activerecord(1.13.2 not = 1.14.0) (Gem::LoadError)
    from /usr/local/lib/site_ruby/1.8/rubygems.rb:136:in `activate’
    from /usr/local/lib/site_ruby/1.8/rubygems.rb:162:in `activate’
    from /usr/local/lib/site_ruby/1.8/rubygems.rb:161:in `each’
    from /usr/local/lib/site_ruby/1.8/rubygems.rb:161:in `activate’
    from /usr/local/lib/site_ruby/1.8/rubygems.rb:37:in `require_gem_with_options’
    from /usr/local/lib/site_ruby/1.8/rubygems.rb:31:in `require_gem’
    from /usr/bin/rails:17

    So, *cough* can that get fixed up?

  7. Josh Susser Says:
    March 28th, 2006 at 7:00 pm

    OK, now I’m annoyed. Seriously. All my Rails apps are now broken, and so is Rake so I can’t even run ‘rake freeze_gems’ to lock them to the old version. ‘gem list’ shows the old versions of the gems still (e.g. 1.13.2 for ActiveRecord, not 1.14.0), so I’m not sure what’s going on, but when I run Rake I get an error:
    RubyGem version error: activerecord(1.13.2 not = 1.14.0) (Gem::LoadError)

    Did anyone actually test whether deployed apps could survive upgrading the gems? There are several steps required to upgrade an app, and while I don’t have a lot of experience as to failure modes and workarounds, it sure seems like this upgrade has messed things up royally. I’m about to call support to make sure people know about the mess someone just made.

    Exciting, indeed.

  8. Marty Smith Says:
    March 28th, 2006 at 8:22 pm

    Yes, I had 3 applications running as well. All are broke now. Who is responsible for this screw up? Did anyone even test to see what effect this would have on all existing Rails apps?

  9. Marty Smith Says:
    March 28th, 2006 at 8:23 pm

    Yes, I had 3 applications running as well. All are broke now. Who is responsible for this screw up? Did anyone even test to see what effect this would have on all existing Rails apps? Couldn’t have come at a better time either…one of my bigger clients is starting to beta test one of the apps that I threw up on DH tomorrow!

  10. Josh Susser Says:
    March 28th, 2006 at 8:24 pm

    Here’s a workaround:

    cd [your rails app]/vendor
    curl -O “http://rubyforge.rubyuser.de/rails/rails-1.0.0.tgz”
    tar xzvf rails-1.0.0.tgz

    This will create a rails directory in vendor that holds the 1.0 release, and should let your app operate again. Worked for me.

  11. novalis Says:
    March 28th, 2006 at 8:43 pm

    Josh, thanks for that. It got me up and running again in no time.

  12. Jay Says:
    March 28th, 2006 at 9:33 pm

    I was able to get this to work for a client, thanks Josh - but I noticed I had to resort back to dispatch.cgi. When dispatch.fcgi was enabled in my .htaccess file this still did not work. What a pain!

  13. Marty Smith Says:
    March 28th, 2006 at 9:38 pm

    Josh, tried that…everything ran fine on the tar, but my app still wont load. Even switched to CGI like Jay…any ideas…did you have to wait a period of time, or reset something?

  14. Epaminondas Pantulis Says:
    March 28th, 2006 at 10:39 pm

    Oh my, DH screwed it up with the 0.14 migration and now they managed to make it again. That makes it a whopping second time! You see, I’m only running this puny weblog and two small toy apps, so I cannot complain that much. But how can I recommend DH to anyone supposed to be doing paid work with Rails?

    This is a big no-no.

  15. New typo theme. Says:
    March 28th, 2006 at 11:09 pm

    [...] Nu dat Dreamhost rails ge-upgrade heeft naar 1.1 zou ik het straf vinden dat alles blijft marcheren sinds typo nog niet echt compatible is met 1.1, maar alee we zullen wel zien zekers. [...]

  16. Rizwan Reza Says:
    March 29th, 2006 at 1:11 am

    curl -O http://rubyforge.rubyuser.de/rails/rails-1.0.0.tgz

    There should be no quotes, I believe. It will give you an error. Thought I’d mention.

  17. robert Says:
    March 29th, 2006 at 2:40 am

    Just unpacking rails into vendor dir. won’t work for some reason for typo.
    I’ve uploaded the correct rails vendor dir at http://clarity.awakeheart.net/rails.zip that works ok.
    just unpack it and off you go!

  18. Justin Forder Says:
    March 29th, 2006 at 2:43 am

    Josh Susser has published a new fix at:

    http://blog.hasmanythrough.com/articles/2006/03/28/hosts-upgrade-to-1-1-doom

    (He tried to post again here, but was blocked by spam protection.)

    He writes:

    “Here’s a workaround that should let your app run:

    cd [RAILS_ROOT]/vendor
    svn export “http://dev.rubyonrails.org/svn/rails/tags/rel_1-0-0″ rails

    This will create a rails directory in vendor that holds the 1.0 release, and should let your app operate again. Worked for me.”

  19. Unofficial DreamHost Blog » Blog Archive » Rails upgraded to 1.1 Says:
    March 29th, 2006 at 3:18 am

    [...] Rails 1.1 is officially out and DreamHost has already upgraded their installation. [...]

  20. Sean Mountcastle Says:
    March 29th, 2006 at 5:45 am

    The upgrade to Rails 1.1 was botched as the gems for activerecord 1.14.0 and actionpack 1.12.0 were not installed.

    gem list –local on holt shows the following:

    [holt]$ gem list –local | grep acti
    actionmailer (1.2.0, 1.1.5)
    actionpack (1.11.2)
    actionwebservice (1.1.0, 1.0.0)
    activerecord (1.13.2)
    activesupport (1.3.0, 1.2.5)

    Did someone forget the –include-dependencies when performing the gem update rails?

    Sean

  21. Tex Texerson Says:
    March 29th, 2006 at 6:07 am

    You guys are usually pretty awesome, but blowing up every single (non-edge) Rails app you host is PRETTY SUCKY. Is it exciting? I really really want Rails 1.1, but I really really REALLY want working Rails apps.

  22. Tom Wilcoxen Says:
    March 29th, 2006 at 6:26 am

    First, I have to say that it’s a pretty good idea to run with your own version of Rails if you are on a shared host — any shared host. This would be one really good reason. I have two sites on DH and they both have been on Edge Rails for months and didn’t blink with this change. It would be a daunting task to expect DH to test all of your applications to see what the upgrade would do. I prefer to have them keep it fresh myself.

    Here’s how I set up Typo on Edge Rails:

    http://convergentarts.com/articles/2005/11/30/typo-trunk-on-edge-rails

    -Tom

  23. Tex Texerson Says:
    March 29th, 2006 at 7:21 am

    Tom, that’s a pretty nice idea and all, but it pretty much defeats the purpose of Dreamhost offering Rails at all. By this logic, I and every other customer, should compile our own versions of PHP just in case DH breaks that. That’s not really going to happen. Sure, I switched to using my own local copy of Rails 1.1 and gems, but to expect every user that’s installed Typo to know how to do that.. And consider that not every single customer reads the DH blog, your blog or the handful of others that have posted workarounds. And I don’t know about you, but I haven’t gotten an email telling me there’s a problem, let alone a workaround.

  24. Edward Says:
    March 29th, 2006 at 7:55 am

    Rails 1.1 also says it requires Ruby 1.8.4, and it still says ruby 1.8.2 on the server:

    [holt]$ ruby -v

    ruby 1.8.2 (2005-04-11) [i386-linux]

  25. William Says:
    March 29th, 2006 at 8:52 am

    I used Josh’s workaround and it didn’t work for about 15mins - even killalled the fcgis (not that they were running anyway) - then all of a sudden it worked after this time.

    This is not good - ‘hope you have your cup on, DH

    ~William

  26. Rizwan Reza Says:
    March 29th, 2006 at 9:05 am

    I don’t think I will be using Rails 1.1 on Dreamhost yet. They must fix things like upgrading Ruby and Rails components.

  27. Rails 1.1, keep dreaming Says:
    March 29th, 2006 at 9:30 am

    [...] Dreamhost has apparently upgraded Ruby on Rails to 1.1 on their servers. Too bad someone was asleep (har har) when they did it, because it’s all broken. Various gems didn’t get installed correctly and none of the rails commands work right. Hopefully this entry will soon look dated. [...]

  28. Andrew Says:
    March 29th, 2006 at 9:42 am

    As far as I can tell, everything is still broken.

    DH team: Can we get some info about what’s going on and when it will be fixed? I’m losing business here.

  29. Nick Says:
    March 29th, 2006 at 9:47 am

    Upgrading 2 days after a release? Textdrive did the same. That is just really, really, really, really, really dumb.

  30. Darren Says:
    March 29th, 2006 at 10:18 am

    Up until today I was impressed with DH. Now I have to wonder how they justify upgrading all servers with out have some kind of beta or opt in for Rails 1.1. Good job I haven’t started referring anyone yet, I’d look stupid now.

    My blog’s screwed and since I don’t have shell access it will stay screwed until DH get Rails 1.0 back on.

  31. John Says:
    March 29th, 2006 at 11:00 am

    I’m really dissapointed with the response of Dreamhost to this issue.

    What happened

    A client’s website went down before a presentation.
    A look in the logs indicated a problem with Rails
    Fired off an email to support
    Waited….
    Found this blog after a bit of clicking around the forums and fixed the problem manually
    Eventually received a response saying the problem was an upgrade after 12 hours or so

    What I would have liked to happen
    The new version of Rails should have been tested with existing apps for at least a couple of weeks!
    We should have been warned in advance the upgrade was planned
    IF something did break, a general announcement should have been made to say ‘it’s a rails problem, we’re fixing it’, not the silence we got

  32. i survived Says:
    March 29th, 2006 at 11:08 am

    [...] So DreamHost decided to upgrade to Rails 1.1 out of the blue without warning. Lots of people are upset. I too was upset when I found out that my blog suddenly went down due to breaking changes in versions of Rails. I wasn’t about to scream and rant. [...]

  33. Khang Toh Says:
    March 29th, 2006 at 11:27 am

    I was actually going to consider getting a dedicated server from you guys when Gizmoojo launches but oh well.. my confidence just dropped ****

    *** How about some really good deals on your Dedicated Servers package for all your Rails customers because of this boo boo. ;)

  34. Gizmoojo! » Blog Archive » Downtime Says:
    March 29th, 2006 at 11:35 am

    [...] * Dreamhost Blog has all the details and rants!!!  Posted by gizmoojo Filed in Ruby on Rails, gizmoojo, dreamhost [...]

  35. edmz » Blog Archive » Dreamhost Actualiza Rails a 1.1 Says:
    March 29th, 2006 at 12:21 pm

    [...] Vean los comentarios que hay en el blog de Dreamhost. [...]

  36. Dallas Says:
    March 29th, 2006 at 1:02 pm

    Sorry everyone!

    In the past we have waited a week or two before upgrading Rails but we have then had to deal with a continuous stream of people sending us support requests asking us when we are going to upgrade. The general feeling we have gotten from the majority of our Ruby on Rails users is ‘give us the new stuff now!’ so that’s what we decided to do this time around. Unfortunately, the upgrade was done incompletely and broke everything. Rails is still a pretty new technology for everyone involved and we goofed.

    Note that we do not uprgade dedicated servers right away just in case something like this happens. We let them stay stable until we’re pretty sure it’s safe to upgrade. That’s not a sales pitch but just a response to the guy thinking about getting a dedicated server.

    We have now reverted all of our servers back to Ruby on Rails 1.0 and will be taking the upgrade more slowly the next time around. Even after the Rails 1.1 install was fixed we still saw broken websites (and not just Typo installs) so it seems as if the Rails developers spoke a little too soon when they said it would be an easy upgrade. It is advised that everyone freeze your sensitive applications at this version of Rails 1.0 until you can test any future Rails upgrades on your own code. We’ll be adding more information about that to wiki.dreamhost.com as well as in another blog post here.

  37. peter Says:
    March 29th, 2006 at 2:20 pm

    “Note that we do not uprgade dedicated servers right away just in case something like this happens. We let them stay stable until we’re pretty sure it’s safe to upgrade. That’s not a sales pitch but just a response to the guy thinking about getting a dedicated server.”

    Does this mean I can get a dedicated server?

  38. Jordan Arentsen Says:
    March 29th, 2006 at 2:30 pm

    Can we ask to have our seperate accounts upgraded? I’ve been testing on 1.1, and all my stuff works fine.

  39. Dallas Says:
    March 29th, 2006 at 3:09 pm

    You can upgrade your own install of Rails using one of the methods described above for fixing our previous mistake. Something like this would likely work:

    cd [RAILS_ROOT]/vendor
    svn export “http://dev.rubyonrails.org/svn/rails/tags/rel_1-1-0″ rails

    That hasn’t been tested or anything so use at your own risk, beware, etc! If anyone can confirm this one way or the other, please do!

  40. Trevor Says:
    March 29th, 2006 at 4:03 pm

    Thanks!

  41. Tex Texerson Says:
    March 29th, 2006 at 4:12 pm

    I can’t remember if these are the exact steps, but I did someting like this to get my own gems directory in my home directory, including rails:

    in ~/.bash_profile:
    export GEM_HOME=/home//.gems

    in config/boot.rb:
    ENV['GEM_PATH'] = File.expand_path ‘/home//.gems’

    Now you can run:
    gem install rails –include-dependencies

    .. and get a copy of rails all your apps can use. Plus you can install rake and any other gems you want into there, which won’t depend on the system’s rails installation but can be shared across all your apps.

    You might be able to use ~/.gems, haven’t tested it.

  42. nate Says:
    March 29th, 2006 at 4:19 pm

    I’m pretty sure all the Rails gems are pure ruby, too, so you should be able to freeze things on your dev box (because you shouldn’t be developing on our servers!) and just upload it along with the rest of the junk in your trunk.

  43. Kenny Says:
    March 29th, 2006 at 11:38 pm

    “That hasn’t been tested or anything so use at your own risk, beware, etc! If anyone can confirm this one way or the other, please do!”

    cd [RAILS_ROOT]/vendor
    svn export http://dev.rubyonrails.org/svn/rails/tags/rel_1-1-0 rails

    This works fine, but without the quotes, as above.

  44. Jon H Says:
    March 30th, 2006 at 7:54 am

    Computerinnernetdatabase

  45. Khang Toh Says:
    March 31st, 2006 at 8:39 am

    “Note that we do not uprgade dedicated servers right away just in case something like this happens. We let them stay stable until we’re pretty sure it’s safe to upgrade. That’s not a sales pitch but just a response to the guy thinking about getting a dedicated server.”

    So how about a really good deal for the dedicated server to boost my confidence back to above sealevel ;)

  46. tst Says:
    April 5th, 2006 at 3:15 am

    test

  47. Unofficial DreamHost Blog Says:
    April 23rd, 2006 at 1:06 am

    DreamHost Upgrades Rails Monday…

    In case you haven’t read it on the new DreamHost Status Page: DreamHost will start to roll out Ruby on Rails 1.1 early next week.
    When they initially upgraded Rails to 1.1 three weeks ago a lot of application broke since Rails 1.1 isn’t 100…

  48. ~wingerz » Blog Archive » Dreamhosed Says:
    May 4th, 2006 at 7:58 pm

    [...] Yesterday dreamhost just upgraded to a new version of rails, taking doGooder down with it. [...]

  49. Weblog title » Blog Archive » Downtime Says:
    November 27th, 2006 at 6:00 am

    [...] * Dreamhost Blog has all the details and rants!!!  [...]

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