Sho Fukamachi Online

So Rails 2.3.5 is out and while I don’t really know what’s new, I can tell you what isn’t – not running on the current stable version of the ruby programming language as reported by Ruby-Lang.

If you would like to start testing Rails on 1.9, you’ll need to apply the patches listed at this Lighthouse ticket, which fix the two most serious problems. A kind user down the bottom of that ticket has pulled the patches into monkeypatches suitable for just slipping into your config/initializers folder – I can confirm that they work for me.

I cannot fathom Rails Core’s bizarre refusal to pull these patches into 2.3.5. Yet another release goes out that is completely non-functional on the newest, fastest and best version of the language, forcing users to seek out and apply non-official monkeypatches – or just forsake 1.9 altogether, as the vast majority seem to be doing. In what way is this in the best interest of the framework or the community? What is holding them back? The patches might not be 100% perfect but they’re a lot better than what we have now, which is that out of the box Rails is broken on 1.9.1.

UPDATE: Happily, the 1.9.1-patched Rails does seem to be working on 1.9.2 as well. I’ve installed ruby 1.9.2dev (2009-09-07 trunk 24787) and my favourite “fussy site” is working there, too. That’s great news, because 1.9.2 is going to be the “serious” version of Ruby 1.9 and has further big performance increases.

So I’ve been ranting recently about Rails’ lack of Ruby 1.9 support. And rightfully so! It’s inexcusable for the #1 Ruby framework to not support the fastest, most efficient version of Ruby, especially not after it’s been available for almost 2 years.

But for some people, it is kind-of possible to use Rails on 1.9 today. Rails’ 2.3-stable (“stable” in quotes) branch has fixed a few of the worst problems in 2.3.4, such as the string comparison bug which made authentication systems unworkable. The showstoppers for me, like the utf8 in templates issue, remain. I wouldn’t rely on it in production – not for a site which your job depends on, anyway – but as long as you don’t use certain features of rails (like i18n), and don’t need to deal with utf8 much if at all, you may be able to use it.

You should want to switch to 1.9.1 as soon as possible. I see between 20% and 50% higher performance than 1.8.7, with memory usage significantly lower and even better, less prone to leakage. In one of my projects there is a daemon which does nothing except wait for items to hit a queue and then launches a script to deal with them. In 1.8.7, it would gain a meg or so every few hours and I’d be nervous about leaving it running unmonitored. In 1.9.1 it sits rock solid on 6.5M for weeks on end. I am totally sold on 1.9.1.

Anyway, here’s the instructions to get Rails up to the latest possible usable state. Open a terminal at the root of your Rails app:

# head into /vendor
$ cd vendor
 
# clear out any other rails
$ rm -rf rails/
 
# clone rails into here
$ git clone git://github.com/rails/rails.git rails
Initialized empty Git repository in /Users/sho/projects/myproject.com/vendor/rails/.git/
remote: Counting objects: 123204, done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (27700/27700), done.
remote: Total 123204 (delta 95101), reused 121853 (delta 94037)
Receiving objects: 100% (123204/123204), 21.72 MiB | 380 KiB/s, done.
Resolving deltas: 100% (95101/95101), done.
 
# enter that directory
$ cd rails/
 
# checkout 2.3 stable, ignore the errors
$ git checkout -b  2-3-stable remotes/origin/2-3-stable
warning: unable to unlink arel: Operation not permitted
warning: unable to unlink rack-mount: Operation not permitted
Branch 2-3-stable set up to track remote branch 2-3-stable from origin.
Switched to a new branch '2-3-stable'
 
# go back to the root dir 
$ cd ../..
 
# run rails as 1.9.1. get ready to find out which gems you forgot!
$ ruby1.9 script/server
 
# hello, console
$ script/console --irb=irb1.9
Loading development environment (Rails 2.3.4)
>> RUBY_VERSION
=> "1.9.1"

And there you go. It’s working, kind of. Try it out.

I would probably recommend using thin as the web server, but if you need a working mongrel in 1.9, my gem is still available:

sudo gem1.9 install sho-mongrel

That will probably die when github pulls gems for real but who knows, maybe the official mongrel will have been fixed by then (HA!).

Meanwhile, I’m going to step up my harassment of the Rails Core team to get this crap fixed; it is a fucking JOKE that it still doesn’t work 100%.

update: moved the gem to gemcutter.