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Today I upgraded to rails 2.3.5 on a server that had an old version of Ubuntu. This is with an old version of ruby 1.9 that was installed using the Ubuntu packages rather than rvm. Here’s what I had to do:

1. Change the rails version

I changed the version in config/environment.rb to 2.3.15.

RAILS_GEM_VERSION = '2.3.15' unless defined? RAILS_GEM_VERSION

More information here.

2. Turn off yaml and symbol deserialization

Add this to config/environment.rb, just before the last end statement (at the end of the configuration block):

  ActiveSupport::CoreExtensions::Hash::Conversions::XML_PARSING.delete('symbol')
  ActiveSupport::CoreExtensions::Hash::Conversions::XML_PARSING.delete('yaml')

More information here. This is apparently also solved by the rails update above, but since this flaw is so harmful I’m glad to have it fixed in more than one place.

3. Require thread

I got this from a StackOverflow post. I added this to the top of config/boot.rb:

require 'thread'

# Don't change this file!
# Configure your app in config/environment.rb and config/environments/*.rb

It says not to change the file, but in this case I am not changing the file to customize my rails app but to make it work with a newer version. I’m not sure this step was necessary.

3. Upgrade rubygems

I had an old version of rubygems. It was installed with apt-get, so I couldn’t upgrade it with gem update --system. Furthermore, since I was running an old version of Ubuntu, apt-get upgrades weren’t working for me. So instead I uninstalled rubygems and installed it from source.

5. Install the gems

I installed the gems for rails with gem install rails --version 2.3.15 and also installed thin and mysql.

6. Restart the web server

Finally I restarted the web server.

Now, this is just one system configuration and chances are most are different so this may not help you. The uninstalling of rubygems and reinstallation from source took quite a while to figure out so I thought I’d share. If this doesn’t solve your problem, you may leave a comment and if I have time I’ll try to help you figure out what went wrong with yours.