Reloading in development

Rails
1

I’ve just started getting so odd symptoms working with webrick. I use
TextMate editing my rails apps over a CIFS mount on the server.
Usually when I “edit/save/reload” a page I see the new changes.
However I’ve started getting the same old data and now have to
frequently restart the webrick server to get my changes to render.
What is available to debug on this to see why this isn’t occuring?

thanks

-zac

2

zac elston wrote:

I’ve just started getting so odd symptoms working with webrick. I use
TextMate editing my rails apps over a CIFS mount on the server.
Usually when I “edit/save/reload” a page I see the new changes.
However I’ve started getting the same old data and now have to
frequently restart the webrick server to get my changes to render.
What is available to debug on this to see why this isn’t occuring?

Zac,

I don’t have a solution, but this happens to me all the time as well.
Here are a few of my guesses or symptoms, in case it helps jog anyone’s
memory. Ruby code changes are almost always picked up, but changes to
rhtml files are often not. It seems to happen more often if I make some
kind of HTML/erb error, fix it and then reload. I first noticed this
when I put various values in my "<!DOCTYPE html..." line at the beginning of the rhtml files. It seemed to work a little better if I left this out, and went to a simple … heading.
Also my rails app directory is on an NFS file server, and there is
sometimes a TIME mismatch between it and the local box which runs rails
and mounts the app dir. In the past this has caused problems with Make
as well.

I hope someone has some idea of how to debug this. I did notice that the
URL was being requested from webrick, so it did not seem to be a browser
cache problem. I Restarted browsers, used IE and Firefox. Same issue. I
run on a Linux RH advanced server 3 system if that helps at all. At home
I use a Mac with Locomotive (and Lighttpd), and don’t remember ever
seeing the problem.

Thanks for any help as well,
Mat Cucuzella

3

mat wrote:

zac elston wrote:

I’ve just started getting so odd symptoms working with webrick. I use
TextMate editing my rails apps over a CIFS mount on the server.
Usually when I “edit/save/reload” a page I see the new changes.
However I’ve started getting the same old data and now have to
frequently restart the webrick server to get my changes to render.
What is available to debug on this to see why this isn’t occuring?

I hope someone has some idea of how to debug this. I did notice that the
URL was being requested from webrick, so it did not seem to be a browser
cache problem. I Restarted browsers, used IE and Firefox. Same issue. I
run on a Linux RH advanced server 3 system if that helps at all. At home
I use a Mac with Locomotive (and Lighttpd), and don’t remember ever
seeing the problem.

I’ve seen it before, and I think it’s a bug (or misconfiguration?) in
rails because:

  1. I am not running in production mode. The page in question is not
    cached.

  2. I see a 200 in the Apache log file.

  3. I observe the same behavior with both Webrick and Apache using
    mod_fcgid.

  4. The development.log file indicates that rails is doing its stuff.

I’m running on Debian stable, with most of the Ruby stuff installed via
gems. The problems occur not in the layout, but when changing stuff in
.rhtml files associated with actions.

It’s a small detail in some ways, but it’s very annoying. Reloading
your web server every time you change a bit of HTML is not exactly
‘progress’ :-/

Being the open source guy that I am, I’m more than willing to have a
stab at fixing this, or at least localizing the buggy code, but am (like
almost everyone else?:slight_smile: new to rails and ruby, and will need some
directions regarding where to look.

Thanks,

David N. Welton

Linux, Open Source Consulting