Dreamhost and Rails 3 solution?

Use ^*linode.com

Email sent to Dreamhost back in August.

I’m going to make a request for this for you. Please note, it’s a significant bump from what we have right now, Rack 1.1.0, so only our rails expert can make the call, and check to make sure it won’t break anything. She’s on vacation this week, but I’ll send her a follow up email, so she can get back with you on this as soon as she’s back.

This was the response I got from Dreamhost after waiting for two months for an answer. (After I had to ask “hey, what’s up?”)

Thanks for writing. We have to be careful with the upgrade as we have a high number of dependency packages that need to go through the upgrade. It’s scheduled and being worked on, and the current estimate for the full upgrade to 3.0.1 is within a month of two. I’ll get back to you again when there is an update, but feel free to contact me if you have any more questions.

*Link includes my referral code

Dreamhost… you win… or lose really.

You have already activated rack 1.1.0, but your Gemfile requires rack 1.2.1. Consider using bundle exec.

So with the impending release of Rails 3 there is a little dependency that was added. Rack 1.2.1. Dreamhost is using passenger which also requires a version of Rack. The problem is that it’s 1.1.0. I’m pretty sure it’s not going to be possible to get Rails 3 running on Dreamhost without the servers being upgraded…

If you’re a Dreamhost customer please be sure to vote this suggestion up.
Get Ready for Rails 3

Please be sure to file a support ticket as well.

For me, if this isn’t fixed within the next few weeks I plan on moving to linode.com

I beat Dreamhost. How to really get rails 3, bundler and dreamhost working.

Please check out my earlier post so you can get the whole git/capistrano setup working as well.

So I’ve been trying to get rails 3 running with bundler on Dreamhost for a while. I’ve had a few posts on here about how to do it. In the end, they didn’t work completely. I’ve sent requests into Dreamhost to upgrade rubygems to 1.3.6 so the newest versions of bundler would work. I was told ‘No’ but go to this wiki site.

I wasn’t too happy about that since the top of the page has a big warning ‘DON’T DO THIS’. If you’re here looking at this you probably have the tech knowhow to do this and realize the world won’t end when you do.

So here’s the step by step directions for how I got it working.
You can check out the original wiki instructions at http://wiki.dreamhost.com/RubyGems.

Add this to your .bashrc
This will setup your shell to use local gems installed in your .gems directory, setup the path to check there first and opt/bin as well. Next we need to install a newer version of rubygems.

This will get rubygems installed and make sure you run your version before dreamhost’s. You then install bundler and rake. These are the only two gems I install in the system as I prefer to have all of my apps use their own gem versions. Putting everything into system is a big mess and a dependency nightmare on updates.

Next we need to make sure your app is setup to use the bundler gem. You need to modify your environment.rb and boot.rb

Make sure you change the application name to your name. Really you’re only adding the single line for the GEM_PATH

I was using the suggestions in the wiki but I eventually figured out that Dreamhost wasn’t properly picking up my gems even with the changed GEM_PATH. Adding the ‘Gem.clear_paths’ to boot.rb allowed the gems to be seen. This is what finally cracked the problem.

Hopefully this works for you.

dreamhost, please upgrade rubygems

I’ve posted before about trying to use rails 3 with bundler and dreamhost. This is now not possible. The shared servers for dreamhost use rubygems 1.3.5. In order to use the current version of bundler you need rubygems 1.3.6.

If you are a dreamhost user please make sure to vote up the install rubygems 1.3.6 suggestion from the panel (panel.dreamhost.com) For a company that has been good about supporting ruby and rails this is something that needs to get fixed ASAP.

bundler times two

I wish they would have made a bigger deal about this, but it seems that bundler now has two different gems.

bundler08 is for bundler 0.8.4 and such, which plays really well with rails 2.3.5

bundler is for bundler 0.9.x and beyond which plays well with rails 3 (and rails 2.3.5 if you can get it to work…)

This is a really good thing because you can now install both of them at the same time and the warning that you must un-install all previous versions of bundler is now moot. Really helpful if you’re running on dreamhost with mixed rails 2/3 sites.

bundler and future updates

There was a new post about bundler which addresses a few of the issues that I’ve been having as part of my install.

When running bundle install in the future, Bundler will use packed gems, if available, in preference to gems available in other sources.

This will be nice and solve my issue of re-installing all the gems on each deploy.

You will want to run bundle unlock to remove the lock, then bundle install to ensure that the new dependencies are installed on your system, and finally bundle lock again to relock your application to the new dependencies.

We will add a command in a near-future version to perform all these steps for you (something like bundle install –relock).

This will also replace the unlock, update, lock steps I’ve got in the callbacks.rb for my deploy scripts. Not a huge deal, but fewer commands is better.

The combination of these two updates should speed up the deploy a lot.

rails 3, bundler, git and dreamhost

UPDATE: How to setup your Dreamhost shell account update available here.

Now that rails 3 has hit beta, I decided to see if I could get it running on my dreamhost account. I’m already running a few rails applications using bundler 0.8.1, so the forced upgrade to 0.9.3 (as of this writing) is actually a point of pain, since both versions cannot co-exist.

If you’re not running an old version of bundler, this should be an easy update. If you are, it gets complicated to the point that for now, it’s not worth updating since bundler 0.9.3 still seems to have issues with rails 2.3.x.

The first thing I did was to install the bundler gem in your usual location for dreamhost. This isn’t going to be a “how do I set up rails and custom gems for dreamhost?” post as those resources exist on the web already.

On dreamhost:
gem install bundler

Now you want to setup your rails 3 application, get it into a git repository and push it there. The main point of this post is to include my deploy files which are based on the github ‘git’ deploy strategy, which is really nice. I’ve added in some code for jammit as my asset packager, and some custom bundler callbacks.

I’ve included a gist below with my deploy code. Make sure the files are in the proper directories.