ClickOnChris

My website has been down for the last 2+ days. The reason: Dreamhost upgraded to Rails 2.0 without any warning. Since some of my code was not 2.0 compliant – BAM! down goes my site.

In case I can help anyone else out of a bind, or avoid this horrible fate, here are the steps I had to take to get my website back up and running with Rails 2.0:

1. Add a config.actioncontroller.session entry to my environments.rb file. I added it within the Rails::Initializer block. This was in response to the following error I found in my production.log file:
   A secret is required to generate an integrity hash for cookie session data. Use config.action_controller.session = { :session_key => “_myapp_session”, :secret => “some secret phrase of at least 30 characters” } in config/environment.rb
   Luckily the error tells you exactly what to do

1. Next, I had to fix this error:
   undefined method ‘paginate’
   I fixed it by installing the plugin ‘classic_pagination’. To do this you simply have to run
   “script/plugin install svn://errtheblog.com/svn/plugins/classic_pagination” from your project root.
   Apparently they took out built-in pagination support from Rails 2.0. This will_paginate plugin is supposed to be better, but I didn’t care to figure out how to work it right now.

1. Finally, I had to fix all of my start_form_tag entries.

There was a good demo of how to do this in the what’s new in Rails2? slideshow