Ruby Forum Ruby on Rails > vendor/rails and vendor/plugins vs. system wide rails

Hi:

I am at the end of my development cycle. I am just wondering if others
could give me some deployment advice.

it is nice to have rails system wide thats how i have it on my Mac..
however I have some plugin system wide and some under vendor/plugins..
it just happen that way ..Now it is nice to package everything that you
need under vendor i.e. rails 1.2.2 plus all the plugin application
needs. My question is are there any downside .. i.e performance, maint.
etc.. that i need to think about. Is there any rails best practice?

I appreciate your response.

I'm not sure there's any best practice. But I highly recommend to freeze 
rails (and any other gems you use) in vendor/.

Firstly, your app works with these versions correctly. Can you guarantee 
that if a sysadmin decides to upgrade some gems (or downgrade one for 
another app?) that your application still works as expected.

Some time back a lot of people on shared hosting hosted their Typo blogs 
with a system-wide Rails gem. The admin decided to upgrade rails, and 
all Typo blogs broke. You probably don't want that happening.

Secondly, if you want to upgrade to a new verson of a gem or maybe even 
Rails, you can test this in development first before deploying.

Thirdly, if there are multiple developers on your project, how do you 
know you all use the same gems?

I think freezing all that stuff is just great to do. As far as I know 
there are no performance downsides to this.

Ariejan De vroom wrote:
> I'm not sure there's any best practice. But I highly recommend to freeze 
> rails (and any other gems you use) in vendor/.
> 
> Firstly, your app works with these versions correctly. Can you guarantee 
> that if a sysadmin decides to upgrade some gems (or downgrade one for 
> another app?) that your application still works as expected.
> 
> Some time back a lot of people on shared hosting hosted their Typo blogs 
> with a system-wide Rails gem. The admin decided to upgrade rails, and 
> all Typo blogs broke. You probably don't want that happening.
> 
> Secondly, if you want to upgrade to a new verson of a gem or maybe even 
> Rails, you can test this in development first before deploying.
> 
> Thirdly, if there are multiple developers on your project, how do you 
> know you all use the same gems?
> 
> I think freezing all that stuff is just great to do. As far as I know 
> there are no performance downsides to this.

Thank you. Thats what I thought. Cool!

Cheers