Question

rails app in development mode gives internal server error and not the usual error page with trace. no info in log/development.log either. no matter what server. on any request.

What is wrong?

Answer 1

syntax error caused by invalid character coding under ruby 1.9. most likely you used utf-8 when ruby (and rails) expects ASCII by default in source files. (yeah, right?)

solution is to use BOM http://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-byte-order-mark or put

# encoding: UTF-8

or

# coding: UTF-8

on top of files in utf-8.

To set UTF-8 globally, you can put

config.encoding = "utf-8"

in your config/application.rb which is equivalent to

Encoding.default_external = Encoding::UTF_8
Encoding.default_internal = Encoding::UTF_8

which in turn is the equivalent to putting:

# encoding: UTF-8

or a BOM at the top of every file.

This allows utf-8 globally on all files of the rails app.

If you want a global option on all ruby files, you can use the -E or -K ruby option and set it via the RUBYOPT environment variable, like:

export RUBYOPT=-Ku

or

export RUBYOPT='-E utf-8:utf-8'

see http://www.manpagez.com/man/1/ruby/
see http://zargony.com/2009/07/24/ruby-1-9-and-file-encodings

There’s also gem that sets the magic comment on top on every file that needs it in a Rails project : https://github.com/m-ryan/magic_encoding