Hello all,
I am incredibly excited about Rails 3.0 and we will be using it for
some products in the very near future. The problem is, we are
currently using Debian for our development/production environments and
they don’t have very good support for Rails 3.0 (yet).
Now, I love Debian because it’s incredibly stable, easy to use, tons
of support, etc. However, I am willing to use a different server for
development/production of any Rails 3.0 apps.
So, are many people going to use Debian with Rails 3.0? If so, could
you point me to some articles on best practices, setup guides, etc. If
not, what distro would be best? Anybody know what the guys at
37signals use?
Thanks very much!
what do you mean with “they don’t have very good support for Rails 3.0”
?
just edit your Gemfile, add “gem ‘rails’, ‘3.0.0’” and run bundle
install.
Try rvm. It can be used to store and manage multiple versions ruby
and gems into your home directory under .rvm. It works like this:
http://rvm.beginrescueend.com/rvm/install/
install rvm
$ bash < <( curl http://rvm.beginrescueend.com/releases/rvm-install-head
)
modify your .bash_profile and .bashrc per the instructions output
from above command
have rvm install ruby 1.9.2
$ rvm install 1.9.2
tell rvm you want to use 1.9.2
$ rvm 1.9.2
confirm your using the right version
$ which gem
/home/username/.rvm/rubies/ruby-1.9.2-p0/bin/gem
install rails 3
$ gem install rails --pre
give it a test run
$ rails new my_new_project
$ cd my_new_project
$ bundle install
I am using RVM and I have tried simply updating my Gemfile to include
Rails 3.0,
however, there are some libraries that need to be upgraded in order
for bundle
install to execute properly.
I had to reset my machine back to a snapshot, so I can’t get you the
exact
library that was having trouble, but I do believe it was something
with SQLite3.
The problem lies in using gems which I can keep up-to-date, but using
apt
which only applies security fixes in the stable branch of Debian. If
the libraries
upon which the gems depend are out of date, what is the accepted way
of
fixing that? Should I manually download all of the libraries and their
required
dependencies or should I just use the testing branch of Debian on a
production
server?
Regarding Ubuntu Linux: Ubuntu is based off of Debian; do they stay
more
up-to-date than the stable branch? If so, I would certainly give it a
try, but
I was under the impression that they had many of the same problems as
Debian (with regards to Rails 3).
Thanks for your responses, I appreciate the help very much.
On Tue, Aug 31, 2010 at 12:12 PM, Topher [email protected] wrote:
Regarding Ubuntu Linux: Ubuntu is based off of Debian; do they stay
more
up-to-date than the stable branch? If so, I would certainly give it a
try
Yes, Ubuntu generally stays more up-to date than Debian in my
experience.
Brad
On Tue, Aug 31, 2010 at 1:01 PM, Brad L. [email protected]
wrote:
Yes, Ubuntu generally stays more up-to date than Debian in my experience.
And as a result, Debian remains more stable than Ubuntu.
I use them both. I use Debian on my servers where I need stability
the most, and I use Ubuntu on my desktops where I want (not need) more
“shiny and new” and can afford occasional downtime to fix things when
they break.
–
Greg D.
destiney.com | gregdonald.com
Greg D. wrote:
On Tue, Aug 31, 2010 at 1:01 PM, Brad L. [email protected]
wrote:
Yes, Ubuntu generally stays more up-to date than Debian in my experience.
And as a result, Debian remains more stable than Ubuntu.
I use them both. I use Debian on my servers where I need stability
the most, and I use Ubuntu on my desktops where I want (not need) more
“shiny and new” and can afford occasional downtime to fix things when
they break.
Interesting. When I chose between Debian and Ubuntu about 4 years ago,
part of my reason for choosing Ubuntu was reading that Ubuntu’s package
management was more conservative than Ubuntu’s, and that as a result
Ubuntu packages were more stable than Debian packages. Did something
change in those 4 years?
(I’ve used both Debian and Ubuntu in that time and not noticed much
difference.)
–
Greg D.
destiney.com | gregdonald.com
Best,
Marnen Laibow-Koser
http://www.marnen.org
[email protected]
On Tue, Aug 31, 2010 at 3:23 PM, Marnen Laibow-Koser
[email protected] wrote:
Interesting. When I chose between Debian and Ubuntu about 4 years ago,
part of my reason for choosing Ubuntu was reading that Ubuntu’s package
management was more conservative than Ubuntu’s, and that as a result
Ubuntu packages were more stable than Debian packages. Did something
change in those 4 years?
(I’ve used both Debian and Ubuntu in that time and not noticed much
difference.)
Well… in the 12 years I’ve been using Debian, it has never once left
me with an un-bootable system. The software is frozen for several
months before a stable distro is released, and then updates only
contain security fixes, not new features. The only thing I’ve ever
found more stable than Debian is BSD, FreeBSD in particular has been
rock solid for me over the years. I usually use FreeBSD (or OpenBSD
if my hardware supports it) for my firewall servers where I don’t even
trust Linux.
Ubuntu provides me with bleeding edge new versions of everything, just
like you would want for a modern desktop, but in turn has left me with
an un-bootable system many times. Their recent choice to go ahead
with Grub 2.0, for example, took down 5 developer machines where I
work a few months back… and that was the 10.04 LTS distro that is
supposed to be long-term stable.
I’ve never once had to “fix” a Debian system after performing updates.
Ubuntu I’ve fixed more times that I can count.
I’m sure everyone’s experience varies, but mine has been that Ubuntu
has much newer versions, and as a result is less stable than Debian
overall.
–
Greg D.
destiney.com | gregdonald.com
Thanks so much for all of your comments and thoughts. I have
personally decided that I will continue to use Debian as my
development and production servers due to it’s stability. Since I’m
sticking with Debian, I decided to write down my process of installing
Rails 3 on Debian and all of the small gotchas that I ran into and
turn it into a blog post. For my particular application (which is very
basic and only has some tests written so far), I ran into two major
problems installing the gems when using bundler: 1) SQLite3 was out of
date and 2) Nokogiri needed some dependencies installed. So, below
you’ll find my writeup of what I think is the proper way to install
Rails 3 on Debian Lenny.
I would love some feedback, so if you see anything that looks odd (or
just doesn’t work on your system…mine isn’t quite stock), please let
me know and I’ll update my guide.
http://www.fangiotophia.com/journal/2010/8/31/random-act-of-stupidity-6-debian-rails-3-setup-guide.html
Thanks again for your responses to my question, there were very
helpful in my decision making.
Topher