Today, I spent the majority of the morning getting the Feedzirra gem to work on the production server. It’s a great gem, and I got it working no problem locally (Mac OS X). It requires libcurl, libxml, libxslt…which is all already installed on my Mac, but apparently not on my slicehost slice. After downloading it all, uploading it to the server, and compiling it, I realized that I hadn’t installed taf2-curl yet. Ok, installed that, installed feedzirra….
Anyway, long story short, after many different instances of “no such file to load”s, I don’t know what I did, but at some point, something clicked, and it worked.
Did you know that you can install gems to a whole shitload of different paths? Goody. It just makes life so much more fun. It confuses Rails cause it doesn’t know where to look, not to mention how much it confused me.
Life used to make sense.
Moral of the story: Just use a server that already has everything installed (like hostingrails) because it’s such a pain in the ass, and waste of time to get standard things installed.
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What ever happened to portable deployments? Is real solution to outsource the entire infrastructure or should developers be responsible for build and deployment? In my opinion I think they should go through the pains of deployment and setup because you can’t always rely on a 3rd party to get it right.
I don’t think outsourcing infrastructure is such a bad idea. It reduces cost and eliminates unnecessary learning by the developers. Why do they need to know how to set up Apache or improve performance of sendmail? Why should the customer have to pay a premium rate for a developer to figure these things out when they can get a pre-packaged, pre-configured chunk for a significantly lower cost? A third party may not get it 100% right, but it’ll probably be at least 80% right, and will do the other 20% for less than you or I will because that is what they do.
Keep an eye on Chris Wanstrath’s new project if package/dependency management is getting you down.
http://github.com/defunkt/rip/tree/master
Pleasure meeting you at FutureRuby this weekend.