Deployment is a …http://norman.walsh.name/2006/09/22/deployment9882006-09-22T06:14:13-04:00$Date: 2006-09-22 07:49:27 -0400 (Fri, 22 Sep 2006) $NormanWalsh2006Norman WalshYou can guess the rest of the title. Pardon me while I grumble
a bit.Dance, monkey boy, dance.Debugging remote deployments is really painful. (Big surprise there,
I'm sure.)The root of my problem is that I've allowed my development
environment and my deployment environment to diverge. That's never good.
As the old joke goes, the patient says to his doctor, “Doctor, doctor, it
hurts when I do this,” and the doctor replies, “Well, then, don't do that.”
I have always planned to deploy the photographic metadata code
I've been hacking at
on photodata.org.
As I'm hosting that at DreamHost,
I have little control over the deployment environment.
Unfortunately I didn't notice that they're running
Ruby
1.8.2 where I'm running 1.8.5. In fairness, even if I had, I might not have
expected the difference to bite so hard.Something is different in the net/http library.
The code I wrote in 1.8.5 for providing a body to an HTTP post doesn't work
on 1.8.2 (which doesn't seem to provide a body= method on
HTTPRequest).I looked at the 1.8.2. version of net/http and decided
to punt, that is, to build 1.8.5 on DreamHost. (I'm pretty happy with
DreamHostI wish they included mod_conneg in their Apache
config, though.
in part because I can
build and use my own stuff there.) The find, download, unpack,
configure, build, install dance for Ruby is pretty
straightforward.Of course, then I find that there are a bunch of
gems missing. Luckily gem install
works just fine (it doesn't on my laptop for reasons I've never been able to
adequately understand).But the RMagick gem (which, ironically, won't actually be used on the
web-deployed version but is needed for making thumbnails when annotating images
on the local filesystem), won't install because the version of
ImageMagick is too old.How far back does this chain of prerequisites go, exactly?I had this terrible feeling that ImageMagick was going to be
much more difficult to install. It wasn't, perhaps mostly because I
don't really care if it works or not. That usually helps in software
development.Dance, dance, dance…