Freezing your Rails when you deploy shared
Posted by David December 22, 2005 @ 09:03 PM
If you’re running a Ruby on Rails application on a shared host, it’s super-double-plus recommended to freeze your Rails. Freezing your Rails means putting the framework into vendor/rails instead of floating with whatever gems that are installed on the host. Because if you do so, you’ll automatically be upgraded when they are. Not a great thing for a production application to have forced upon itself.
The great news is that this is silly simple. If you’re running 0.14.x or newer, you can simple do rake freeze_gems, and the current gems the system is used are unpacked into vendor/rails. Now the host can update as silly as it wants without affecting your application.
Also see my rake task for freezing your third-party gems as well.
I do this on dreamhost, but you can’t use config.frameworks to remove :active_record (it tries to reference a class that hasn’t been loaded, ‘Base’). So you if you want to do this on an app with no database, you’ll need to edit initializer.rb and comment out the establish_connection line.
Is it possible to rollback the freeze using rake? As in this scenario:
1) Have development code checked out. 2) Run freeze_gems rake task to copy rails gems into vendor/rails. 3) Deploy application to production host. 4) Run ‘unfreeze_gems’ to remove rails gems from vendor/rails and continue with development using development machine’s gems.
Sean: “rake unfreeze_rails”
sorry, but I don’t understand: why don’t you simply use require_gem with an exact version? The main point of rubygems is to be able to have multiple versions available at the same time.
sorry, but I don’t understand: why don’t you simply use require_gem with an exact version? The main point of rubygems is to be able to have multiple versions available at the same time.
In a shared hosting environment, you can’t install the correct versions of gems. And many hosts don’t realise that multiple versions may be required – or that it’s even possible to have them all installed at the same time.
The safest route is to include everything you need, in one folder, for quick and painless “xcopy” deployment.
And thanks for the time-saving “freeze-other-gems” script, topfunky. Very useful :)
On Windows XP Freezing to the gems for Rails 1.0.0 rm -rf vendor/rails mkdir -p vendor/rails The filename, directory name, or volume label syntax is incorrect. The filename, directory name, or volume label syntax is incorrect. The filename, directory name, or volume label syntax is incorrect. The filename, directory name, or volume label syntax is incorrect. The filename, directory name, or volume label syntax is incorrect. The system cannot find the path specified. rake aborted! undefined method `to_str’ for nil:NilClass