Question

I’m new to ruby on rails development but I am a little confused with why different gems work on some servers and not on others.

Intro: I started learning rails on http://ruby.railstutorial.org/. I also started watching some railscasts by Ryan Bates on http://railscasts.com/

On railscasts, Ryan was talking about using sunspot for text searching. Then, someone in the comment says that using sunspot for production server is tedious. If it works locally on your machine, shouldn’t it work on production server?

On railstutorial, mike was talking about search as well but he mentions Thinking Sphinx and he said to use it for shared host or dedicated server. For heroku, use their docs on text search.

This is my first web development project and came from Windows background so backend servers are still very unknown to me. Is it because of the different types of server (Ex: Nginx, Apache…)?

Thanks much!

Answer 1

Many of those gems require you to set another service up or they may be memory or resource intensive. It really depends on what type of hosting you are going with and the specific gem, if you are on shared hosting for Rails getting things to work can be hard since you don’t have full control over the system.