Ruby on Rails 2.3.2 Upgrade Gotchas

tommy — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 07:53:31 +0000

While cleaning/re-factoring the PeopleJar codebase, we decided to make the move from Rails 2.2.2 to Rails 2.3.2. Rack integration was the biggest single “under the hood” change. Adam Wiggins of Heroku explains the benefits in his Rails Metal, Rack and Sinatra presentation from RailsConf. He has a great example of incorporating a Sinatra app with a Rails app.

No upgrades would be complete without some incompatibilities. As noted on the official Ruby on Rails release notes, test Sessions, Cookies, File uploads, JSON/XML APIs. We found conflicts in the facebooker and ar-extensions gems. Luckily, the developers already pushed out fixes so you can just do a gem update.

There was one other cryptic error in one of our ajax calls:

  Status: 500 Internal Server Error
  private method `split' called for #
    /opt/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/actionpack-2.3.2/lib/action_controller/mime_type.rb:206:in `method_missing'
    /opt/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/rack-1.0.0/lib/rack/request.rb:51:in `media_type'
    /opt/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/rack-1.0.0/lib/rack/request.rb:117:in `parseable_data?'
    /opt/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/rack-1.0.0/lib/rack/request.rb:138:in `POST'
    /opt/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/actionpack-2.3.2/lib/action_controller/request.rb:428:in `request_parameters'

We could fix this with some good old monkey patching! Add this to an initializer in your config/initializers directory. this is a reported bug at the rails lighthouse and should be fixed in the next release.

module Mime
  class Type
    def split(*args)
      to_s.split(*args)
    end
  end
end

Overall, the upgrade went pretty well: just a few gem upgrades and minor tweaks. If you are on Rails 2.2.2 or older, give the upgrade a shot!

Tommy Chheng » rails 2.3.2

Ruby on Rails 2.3.2 Upgrade Gotchas