Question

I’ve spent a fair bit of time with PHP & Python frameworks and recently thought I’d branch out to rails. The framework itself I like, but I seem to spend at least half my development time navigating through odd bugs and/or version incompatibilities between rails/ruby/rake/gems.

I’m happy to battle through it all if it gets less of a hassle, but even after a month it seems like I spend 90% of my time chasing down other people’s bugs & only 10% of my time chasing down my own. The only guy I’ve talked to (who used it extensively until 2008) suggests “For the past 2 years, that’s pretty much rails”

Any opinion on this? Does it get better, or is this just par for rails development at the moment?

Running it through Ubuntu 10.04, if it matters.

Answer 1

Rails is in transition right now between 2.3x and 3.0 so you are going to find it quite challenging as much of the most recent documentation and rails plugin readmes are being updated for rails 3. There are several tools that are indispensable right now for negotiating this stuff. First, Rails 3 uses bundler to manage dependencies, it is a much more civil way to manage gems.

gem install bundler
cd my_rails_project
bundle install

RVM (ruby version manager) is awesome and I would recommend installing it. Then you can build gemsets and dependency sets on a per project basis. and you don’t need to superuser access to install.

also, if it were me, I’d just go ahead and start in rails 3

gem install rails --pre

if you want to stay with rails 2.3.x use the rake task for installing declared dependencies.

rake gems:install

if the project is a good project, it will be pretty specific about what it needs (declared in the config/environment.rb file), then if it doesn’t run, checkout the stack traces to see where its failing.