I’m hoping you guys can help me out. I have recently developed an iphone
location based app and unfortunately the developer went off the rails
towards the end (yea pun intended lol) and when we were handed over all
the
files for the app and admin site there was a number of things missing.
Basically the app doesn’t work but we are trying to fix that and the
admin
website built to integrate with the app was built using rails.
I had someone install the admin site onto Amazon but after trying for
some
time he told me that unfortunately the index file was missing and that I
needed to get from the developer. That’s not possible as he has refused
to
help in any way.
Now I don’t know anything about rails but I know if this was wordpress,
a
missing index.html file would be no problem at all.
I don’t know if that is the case with rails.
I was hoping you may be able to tell me what my options are as far as
getting the admin site up and running without the original index file
and
if it is possible?
Any advice would be greatly appreciated and if you require any further
detail please let me know.
Thank you in advance for your assistance with this as we are lost and
out
of pocket thousands of dollars and just trying to pick up the pieces of
what turned into a nightmare project.
Here are some screen shots of the site admin and an error message that
may
help you to tell us what we can do in this situation.
On Wednesday, December 5, 2012 1:19:15 PM UTC, Brian wrote:
I had someone install the admin site onto Amazon but after trying for some
time he told me that unfortunately the index file was missing and that I
needed to get from the developer. That’s not possible as he has refused to
help in any way.
There’s not necessarily any index.html file at all in a rails app. Is the
person that installed it onto amazon (do they mean EC2?) someone well
versed with rails apps and how to deploy them
detail please let me know.
Thank you in advance for your assistance with this as we are lost and out
of pocket thousands of dollars and just trying to pick up the pieces of
what turned into a nightmare project.
Here are some screen shots of the site admin and an error message that may
help you to tell us what we can do in this situation.
The error message is very generic - it could be anything from a syntax
error in a file to an inability to connect to the database or a missing
library. The application log files (the folder the app is in should have
a
folder called log) will normally supply more detailed information. If
the
app is being served through apache then the apache log files are also
worth
looking at.
A Rails application that has an index.html will show that index page
when the site is requested without any path information, just like a
normal static site. Most Rails sites do not have an index page, but
rather designate one “route” to be the :root path. If there was anything
dynamic on the home page of your site, then likely that is the case.
If you are hearing from your tech person that the site won’t run without
an index page, then perhaps that tech person has never deployed a Rails
app before. There are lots of different ways to do that, the easiest one
I have found is to install the Passenger (mod_rails) module in Apache,
and follow the simple directions to get your Apache virtual host to pass
that site over to Rails.
Now the error messages you are seeing tell me that that’s not the
problem at all – you are getting Rails to run well enough to show an
error message, which is positive. Ask your tech person to shell into the
server and issue the command
tail -f /path/to/rails/project/log/production.log
Then restart the Web server and try to visit the site. The logs will
tell you in excruciating detail what exactly is going wrong.
The quickest and most likely to be successful way out is to get
connected
with someone who has actually built and deployed a RoR app. The work is
fairly straightforward once you know how but if you’re looking at a time
constraint you’ld be best served by someone who’s already familiar -
they’ll just need to learn what you want and understand what their
predecessor has done.
Rick
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