Ruby on Rails is a first class citizen at Joyent, and many customers have succesfully developed and deployed web applications created with Rails.

• Ruby on Rails

In your config/environments/production.rb add this below the config.logger line

# Use a different logger for distributed setups
# config.logger = SyslogLogger.new
ObjectSpace.each_object(Mongrel::HttpServer) { |i| @port = i.port }
raise "Port could not be introspected!" unless @port and @port.to_i > 0
config.logger = Logger.new File.expand_path(RAILS_ROOT+"/log/#{ENV['RAILS_ENV']}.#{@port}.log")

From time to time issues pop up when trying to update gems. First lets see where you currently are by asking gem for it's environment

# gem env 
RubyGems Environment:
  - RUBYGEMS VERSION: 1.1.0 (1.1.0)
  - RUBY VERSION: 1.8.6 (2007-09-24 patchlevel 111) [i386-solaris2]
  - INSTALLATION DIRECTORY: /opt/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.8
  - RUBY EXECUTABLE: /opt/local/bin/ruby18
  - RUBYGEMS PLATFORMS:
    - ruby
    - x86-unknown
  - GEM PATHS:
     - /opt/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.8
  - GEM CONFIGURATION:
     - :update_sources => true
     - :verbose => true
     - :benchmark => false
     - :backtrace => false
     - :bulk_threshold => 1000
  - REMOTE SOURCES:
     - http://gems.rubyforge.org

To find out what is outdated you are able to use the following command:

# gem outdated

In this example let's say part of the output shows that rubygems itself needs to be updated. In the output from above you will something like the following line:

rubygems-update (1.1.0 < 1.2.0)

rubygems manual

First lets try the easy button:

# gem update --system
Updating RubyGems
Bulk updating Gem source index for: http://gems.rubyforge.org/
Updating rubygems-update
ERROR:  While executing gem ... (Gem::GemNotFoundException)
    could not find rubygems-update locally or in a repository

OK that didn't work, so time to manually install. So we are going to use lynx to download the current version, which as of this writing is 1.2.0

# cd /root/src
# lynx http://rubyforge.org/frs/?group_id=126
# tar xvzf rubygems-1.2.0.tgz
# cd rubygems-1.2.0
# ruby setup.rb
# gem env
RubyGems Environment:
  - RUBYGEMS VERSION: 1.2.0
  - RUBY VERSION: 1.8.6 (2007-09-24 patchlevel 111) [i386-solaris2]
  - INSTALLATION DIRECTORY: /opt/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.8
  - RUBY EXECUTABLE: /opt/local/bin/ruby18
  - EXECUTABLE DIRECTORY: /opt/local/bin
  - RUBYGEMS PLATFORMS:
    - ruby
    - x86-unknown
  - GEM PATHS:
     - /opt/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.8
  - GEM CONFIGURATION:
     - :update_sources => true
     - :verbose => true
     - :benchmark => false
     - :backtrace => false
     - :bulk_threshold => 1000
  - REMOTE SOURCES:
     - http://gems.rubyforge.org/

ok so now we have the latest version of rubygem installed, in theory life is very good

# gem install any_gem_name_you_need

should just work.

To update all of the gems you have use:

# gem update

Sometimes the rubygem cache gets really out of wack, so to clear it out.

# gem sources --clear-all

And if the bulk update is the issue try this:

gem update --system -B 50000

Time to pull out the –debug and post to our fourms

# gem install the_thing_which_is_not_working --debug