Media72 Hosting Articles and Tips

We have now installed Ruby on Rails 2.1.2 on all servers. As this release contains security fixes it's recommended that all users of Rails 2.1.x switch to the new 2.1.2 version ASAP.

Rails 2.0.5 has been release which contains security fixes. It's advised all customers using a 2.0.x version of Rails update their applications to use the 2.0.5 version as soon as possible.

Media72 are pleased to announce the immediate availability of mod_rails driven Ruby on Rails hosting packages. Mod_rails, or Phusion Passenger as it is also known, has been gaining a lot of attention recently, and rightly so. It's a huge step forward for the Rails hosting community in terms of application deployment and management. Many big names in the industry such as David Heinemeier Hansson and Yukihiro Matsumoto (Matz) already have good things to say about mod_rails. Mod_rails vastly simplifies Ruby on Rails deployment, no longer will you have to mess around with .htaccess files or deal with fastcgi fickleness. Deployment can be as simple as uploading your rails application then loading it in your browser. And restarting your application is achieved by simply creating a text file called restart.txt in your rails tmp directory, what could be more simple? Our customers are already enjoying the benefits of mod_rails and we are one of the only hosts in the UK to offer support for mod_rails at this time. All of our rails accounts are hosted in our well connected London data centre which means fantastic speeds around Europe. Using Media72 you will also enjoy better search engine rankings with the UK engines when compared to hosting elsewhere. Why not take a look at our comprehensive range of mod_rails based packages? Prices start from only £7 a month.

It has come to our attention that many users have not been receiving system update notifications via email due to spam filters of incorrect email addresses in our system. We will now be publishing all update notifications to our blog, as well as to all affected users via their primary contact email. What follows is a repost of the details sent out to customers last week: As of today, all severs now only have versions 2.0.2, 2.0.1, 1.2.6, and 1.1.6 or the rails gem installed. Please update any rails applications you have to use these versions only. To update the version of rails you are using edit your config/environment.rb file and set the RAILS_GEM_VERSION to one of the installed versions. Our rails version policy is to keep most new versions of rails installed, unless a security hole or performance issue has been identified, and two old major versions. For instance, at this time we have two flavours of 2.x and the two most up-do-date old versions, 1.2.6 and 1.1.6. When the next major version of rails is release, e.g. 2.1 or above, we will send out notifications and remove version 1.1.6. We will be keeping rails version 1.2.6 for some time to support legacy customers as the upgrade from 1.x to 2.x can require some amount of work. The Media72 Team

After upgrading our servers to Rails 2.0 it has come to our attention this has caused problems for some customers rails applications where the application will fail to start. This will happen when your application is not set to use a specific version of rails and will therefor load the most recent version of rails. On servers where customers have been affected we have removed rails 2.0. This is a temporary measure to give customers time to upgrade their applications. We will be reinstalling rails 2.0 on all servers on Friday 14th December. Read on to see how to make sure your rails application will still work after the upgrade. We are advising all customers to either specifically set the rails version to use in your environment or freeze your rails gems. To set the rails environment in your config edit the config/environment.rb file and un-comment or add the following line: RAILS_GEM_VERSION = '1.2.6' To freeze your rails gems run the following command from your rails application root: rake rails:freeze:gems This will copy all of the files needed to run rails into your vendor/rails directory. If you need to freeze to a specific version of rails run the following command: rake rails:freeze:edge TAG=rel_1-2-6 You may also need to include your other gems within your application, there is an excellent article by Chris Wanstrath called vendor everything that covers how and why you should do this. Lastly, anyone wanting to upgrade their current application to rails 2.0 should first upgrade to rails version 1.2.6 and check for any depreciation warnings before making the leap to rails 2.0. Also watch out for the code that has been removed from rails and is available in plugin form!

Thats right folks, today is a big day for Rails and marks the release of version 2.0. For a full run down see DHH's post on the the Ruby on Rails site. We have already upgraded all of our servers to include Rails 2.0.1 so that you guys can get your teeth into it straight away. Sign up with any one of our rails accounts and get instant access to Rails 2.0. How to upgrade? "If you want to move your application to Rails 2.0, you should first move it to Rails 1.2.6. That’ll include deprecation warnings for most everything we yanked out in 2.0. So if your application runs fine on 1.2.6 with no deprecation warnings, there’s a good chance that it’ll run straight up on 2.0. Of course, if you’re using, say, pagination, you’ll need to install the classic_pagination plugin.... And so on and so forth for all the extractions." If you want to keep using Rails 1.x please be sure to set your rails version in your environment.rb file. Happy Rails coding everyone!

Hot on the heals of the 1.2.4 release rails 1.2.5 is now out, as usual all of our servers have been upgraded. Rails 1.2.5 is a security and maintenance release that fixes a JSON XSS vulnerability, fixes a couple of minor regressions introduced in 1.2.4, and backports a handful of features and fixes from the 2.0 preview release. From the Riding Rails Post: Summary of changes:

• acts_as_list: fixed an edge case where removing an item from the list then destroying the item leads to incorrect item positioning
• deprecated calling .create on has_many associations with an unsaved owner (like post = Post.new; post.comments.create)
• backport array and hash query parameters
• fix in place editor’s setter action with non-string fields
• updated config/boot.rb to correctly recognize RAILS_GEM_VERSION

Hot on the heals of the Ruby on Rails 2.0 & 1.2.4 announcement the Rails team have released Rails version 1.2.4. At Media72 Hosting we always keep bang up to date with our Rails software so that you guys always have the option of using the latest release. Customers now have the option, on most servers, of using Rails 1.2.4, 1.2.3, 1.2.2, 1.2.1, 1.1.6, or 1.1.3, along with our large number of installed gems.