I recently signed up on a shared hosting plan for playing around with Ruby on Rails apps.  I finally had an app roughly together, and I wanted to test out my deployment using Capistrano.  I was able to configure my deploy.rb file so everything uploaded correctly, and figured that was the hardest bit.  Little did I know that my biggest challenge was getting gems to work.  Now to be fair, I haven’t been doing Rails day in and day out like ASP.NET, so it could just be me being naive, but that didn’t seem to be the case. 

The Problem

So after the deploy, I went to start up the application using cPanel.  I hit the big Run button and got the “The following Ruby on Rails application was started: myapp” message, but when I went back to the Rails section of the cPanel, of course myapp wasn’t running.

Off to the logs where mongrel.log gave me the error “Missing these required gems.”  Duh.  I had specified the gems I needed in the environment.rb file using the config.gem method, so I could just do a rake gems:install to fix that.  Awesome… err…  not so much.  Went to start the application again in cPanel, same deal.  The real annoying bit was I got the same “Missing these required gems” message as before. Commence with beating ones head against the wall… More...

As I’m sure most of you know, I’m a hardcore C#/.NET guy.  The majority of my work as been on the web, and I’ve been using ASP.NET since the earliest betas.  ASP.NET’s profound effect on web development is still going strong to this day.  For me, the first choice for web application development has been ASP.NET.  Well, I decided to venture out a bit recently. 

WHAT?

Believe me, I feel a little “dirty” cheating on ASP.NET MVC with a mistress named Ruby but I have to tell you, Rails is incredible.  Let the record show I am still one of Microsoft’s and .NET’s biggest fans, and I still love C#.  That said, I am one of those developers who just flat out loves learning.  I am so passionate about development, it consumes me (just ask my wife).  So one day last year, I decided to broaden my horizons and look at Rails.  I attribute my development metamorphosis to Manning Publications and the “Pop Quiz” they ran last fall.  Their daily questions got me looking beyond the .NET realm into other areas a bit outside my comfort zone.  Being outside your comfort zone allows you as a developer to see things in a totally different light.  It’s real good to mix things up a bit, and it makes you an all around better developer.  In fact Peter Bromberg recently tweeted “I think one should learn everything they can. Then, you'll be in a better position to decide what you want to use.”  I couldn’t agree more.  More...