Question

I’ve inherited a small Rails project from a new client and unfortunately the previous developer(s) left essentially no information other than the Rails app instance running in production. (No source repository, no documentation, just the login to the production server.)

Inspecting the server shows Rails version 2.3.8 installed (confirmed by the version number in “config/environment.rb”) but when I try to run “ruby script/console” (or “server”) on my local dev environment I get (essentially fatal) error messages originating from files in “vendor/rails/railties” and searching the internet for “railties” shows a lot of Rails 3 documentation.

I’m guessing that a previous developer/maintainer crossed the Rails 2/3 streams somehow. Should I be ok to just delete the entire “vendor/rails” directory or am I missing something?

Answer 1

What kind of error are you getting? Do you know that your local environment is the same as production? Do other Rails 2.3.8 projects run fine on your machine?

Now, I think it should be fine to remove vendor/rails with the exception being that if the previous developer monkeypatched something in Rails, but directly in the vendor/rails directory. Then, you might have a problem.

This approach might be a bit tedious, but I might go as follows:

• Clone 2.3.8 somewhere else on my machine.
• Check it in to some form of version control.
• Copy your version of 2.3.8 from the project into the newly cloned directory.
• Diff it.

This should show you if the previous developer made any changes, both significant and insignificant, to Rails.

Good luck, because this doesn’t sound very fun 🙁