Question

When I open up a page that’s using my CSS it will work once, but won’t work again until you open up the CSS and re-save it. Every other time I try to directly access my CSS, it works fine. But the other times, it doesn’t work and I receive this server output:

[2010-08-01 12:49:37] ERROR NoMethodError: private method `gsub!' called for #<Class:0x7f6d0639ad80>
    /usr/lib/ruby/1.8/webrick/htmlutils.rb:16:in `escape'
    /usr/lib/ruby/1.8/webrick/httpresponse.rb:232:in `set_error'
    /var/www/rails-blog/vendor/rails/railties/lib/webrick_server.rb:94:in `handle_file'
    /var/www/rails-blog/vendor/rails/railties/lib/webrick_server.rb:73:in `service'
    /usr/lib/ruby/1.8/webrick/httpserver.rb:104:in `service'
    /usr/lib/ruby/1.8/webrick/httpserver.rb:65:in `run'
    /usr/lib/ruby/1.8/webrick/server.rb:173:in `start_thread'
    /usr/lib/ruby/1.8/webrick/server.rb:162:in `start'
    /usr/lib/ruby/1.8/webrick/server.rb:162:in `start_thread'
    /usr/lib/ruby/1.8/webrick/server.rb:95:in `start'
    /usr/lib/ruby/1.8/webrick/server.rb:92:in `each'
    /usr/lib/ruby/1.8/webrick/server.rb:92:in `start'
    /usr/lib/ruby/1.8/webrick/server.rb:23:in `start'
    /usr/lib/ruby/1.8/webrick/server.rb:82:in `start'
    /var/www/rails-blog/vendor/rails/railties/lib/webrick_server.rb:60:in `dispatch'
    /var/www/rails-blog/vendor/rails/railties/lib/commands/servers/webrick.rb:66
    /usr/lib/ruby/1.8/rubygems/custom_require.rb:31:in `gem_original_require'
    /usr/lib/ruby/1.8/rubygems/custom_require.rb:31:in `require'
    /var/www/rails-blog/vendor/rails/activesupport/lib/active_support/dependencies.rb:153:in `require'
    /var/www/rails-blog/vendor/rails/activesupport/lib/active_support/dependencies.rb:521:in `new_constants_in'
    /var/www/rails-blog/vendor/rails/activesupport/lib/active_support/dependencies.rb:153:in `require'
    /var/www/rails-blog/vendor/rails/railties/lib/commands/server.rb:49
    /usr/lib/ruby/1.8/rubygems/custom_require.rb:31:in `gem_original_require'
    /usr/lib/ruby/1.8/rubygems/custom_require.rb:31:in `require'
    script/server:3
127.0.0.1 - - [01/Aug/2010:12:49:37 BST] "GET /stylesheets/scaffold.css HTTP/1.1" 500 343
- -> /stylesheets/scaffold.css?1280662371

The code I’m using to include the stylesheet is <%= stylesheet_link_tag 'scaffold' %>. I’ve restarted the Ruby server but with no effect. What could be causing this problem?

This is from reading one of the official guides.

This does not happen when running Mongrel.

Answer 1

This is a bug in WEBrick, see http://www.ruby-forum.com/topic/206225.

On 10.06.2010 03:19, Michael Pitman (mcp) posted:

To continue using Webrick, instead of
switching to Mongrel, you can also
just edit line 15 of
lib/ruby/1.8/webrick/htmlutils.rb to
read

  str = string ? string.to_s.dup : ""

The problem is that NotModified
exception is getting passed to
HTMLUtils::escape as a class, rather
than a string (originally raised in
HTTPServlet::DefaultFileHandler).
Since the only things that can really
be HTML escaped are strings, it should
be safe to always convert the input
to string.

I suspect that the potential
performance penalty may prevent a
solution like that from making it to
the standard ruby library, but it’s a
simple workaround.

Alternatively, in the handle_file
method of webrick’s DispatchServlet
(lib/webrick_server.rb in the rails
gem), before it calls res.set_error
with the exception, you could force
the err.message to be a string, or
even clear the message, since I think
it’s discarded anyway for
NotModified.

Michael