When Rails 1.1.0 was released, many web hosting companies who did the major upgrade experienced failed RoR applications due
to incompatibilities.
However some forward thinking developers avoided the downtime by "freezing" their gems. This involves unpacking the gems
into the vendor folder of a Rails app.
It is highly recommended that RoR developers freeze their gems to allow total control of the production environment.
Also, you do not have to wait for someone to install a special gem you require.
Create a .gems directory in your root and download/install some gems
SSH to root:
[~]# mkdir .gems
[~]# gem install gem_name -i ~/.gems
Temporarily assign GEM_HOME and GEM_PATH
[~]# export GEM_HOME=$HOME/.gems
[~]# export GEM_PATH=/usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.8:$GEM_HOME
Unpack gems to your app's vendor folder and require them correctly
Rails with automatically check to see if there is a frozen (or unpacked)
gem in the vendor folder of an app before it looks for the default server gems
folder.
So, to take control of your application:
Logout and start a new session or rake will not work.
[~]# cd rails_app
[~/rails_app]# rake freeze_gems
This will freeze the Rails version you downloaded.
To unpack/freeze other gems to the vendor folder, do the following:
[~]# cd vendor
[~/vendor]# gem unpack gem_name
[~/vendor]# gem unpack another_gem_name
Your Rails app will permanently run on these gems unless you delete the vendor
folder.
Note: some gems need to be required manually (very rare though after Rails
1.1.0). Be sure to include the lib folder:
require 'RedCloth/lib/RedCloth'
Everything is now frozen.
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