Maintenance pains

Write web application is no problem – keep it live through changing environment it is real challenge.

I have left Run-N-Share for a long time without any updates. Now I want to publish some new features from my development branch. But first I wanted to update code to work with current edge Rails. And troubles have begun.

First, changes to FCGI handler requires to add to config/environemnt.rb secret for generating sessions cookies and name for that cookie. When not set Rails complains about it in development log:


A session_key is required to write a cookie containing the session data. Use config.action_controller.session = { :session_key => "_myapp_session", :secret => "some secret phrase" } in config/environment.rb


This from Rails revision 6453. I was not so lucky when I did rake rails:freeze:edge few days ago this error message was following:


A secret is required to generate an integrity hash for cookie session data. Use config.action_controller.session = { :secret => "some secret phrase" } in config/environment.rb


Do You see subtle difference? Following instructions I have added only :secret and spend few hours trying to figure out what is going on. Finally I did upgrade to newest edge and have read new error message.

RNS uses acts as taggable plugin. It was used as local plugin in vendor/plugins but I decided to move to global gem instead. It was already installed, I did this change couple revisions ago. So when starting Rails application I found /usr/local/bin/rake:17:Warning: require_gem is obsolete. Use gem instead. I changed require_gem 'acts_as_taggable' to simple gem 'acts_as_taggable'. Result?


ActionView::TemplateError (undefined method `acts _as_taggable' for Route:Class) on line #22 of app/views/route/find_routes.rhtml


Well I have no idea why it does not load gem.