I have just been informed that a Rails 3 project I’ve been working on will have to be deployed to a production environment without a connection to the Internet. Obviously, this is quite concerning to me because most everything I know about Ruby on Rails involves some form of Internet connection in order to, for example, download required gems.
What options will I have for deploying a Ruby on Rails application to a production environment if it contains no physical connection to the Internet (assume the production environment will not have all required gems and most likely will not contain a current installation of Rails 3)? Am I going to have to tell them to suck it up and connect it to the Internet for the duration of the installation?
The production environment is a SuSE Linux Enterprise 11 server.
You can freeze your gems in rails 2 (or bundle package in rails 3). That will store all your gems inside your vendor directory, which should dramatically mitigate your problem. You will still need to do the initial setup of rails though, that will be a bit of a nightmare without the internet.