There are a lot of rails 2.3.x apps that have slipped out of maintenance but are still used. When it comes time to add a feature to them, the original developer may be unavailable or may not have the same configuration for running it in development mode. I found myself in that situation and here’s what I did to run it:
- Start a new vagrant instance with Ubuntu. This makes things easy to install.
- Install rvm and the same ruby version. The project I received had a .rvmrc which specified a version of 1.8.7. The first time I told rvm to install the old version of ruby, I exited after rvm game me a list of packages to install, and installed those packages. Then I told rvm to install ruby again and it worked.
- Install the version of rails. It’s in config/environment.rb. Mine was 2.3.5. I ran “gem install rails -v 2.3.5”.
- Install dependencies specified in config/environment.rb. On this project it was just prawn, the pdf generator.
- Set up the database. This was the usual drill on this project. Nothing different from a new version of rails, except it was mysql instead of mysql2. I installed the Ubuntu database packages (libmysqlclient-devel and mysql-server), set up the database according to config/database.yml, and tried running rake db:migrate and after that failed ran rake db:schema:load.
- Go back to an old version of rubygems. I ran “gem update –system 1.5.3”
- Go back to an old version of rake. The breaking changes in rake were pretty much the worst thing ever. Switch to the global gemset and uninstall rake, and install rake again with “gem install rake –version=0.8.7”. If you’re having trouble with rake, 0.8.7 is probably the version you’ll want.
After that you’ll hopefully be able to run commands in script/ as well as rake commands.
In my experience it’s enough of a pain to go from 2.3.5 to 2.3.14 that it might be better to just go from 2.3.5 to the latest 3.x version. This will require a lot of changes but it will make the app ready to be worked on by most rails developers again.