Tomorrow I'm heading off to Salt Lake City for West Mountain Ruby Conf. I always like traveling, especially on someone else's tab. We get back Sunday afternoon, and that evening I'm meeting a friend of mine in a situation which _I_ certainly consider a date. Which means I'll find a way to make a complete fool of myself.
I ran into a bizarre error today and thought I'd see if anyone else had run into it. I moved an app to a testing environment and after I got the stack configured, the app was failing with every call.
I verified that the mongrel conf file was correct, that the web server was running properly, etc, etc, and nothing was showing up in either error log. I finally looked in the application error log and after sifting through the stack trace found that the problem was occuring in /usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/actionpack-1.13.4/lib/action_controller/cgi_ext/pstore_performance_fix.rb.
It turned out that it was looking for the session files in app_root/tmp/sessions//ruby_sess.asdfasdfasdf. Since there was a '//' in the path it was dying, but I can't figure out where that came from. By opening up the pstore_performance_fix.rb file mentioned above and taking a "...+ '/' + ..." out of line 15 the problem went away.
When I saw that, I thought that I must have added an extra slash in the mongrel_cluster conf, but I verified that there isn't one.
Weird, especially considering the app worked perfectly in the dev environment. Anyway, by changing that line I have the stack up and running. I also made a debian package for updating the code which will make updating easier.
I may spend part of tomorrow looking at evented mongrel and swiftiply. The site with the article is the blog of Ezra Zygmuntowicz, who is the founder of Engine Yard and a Rails deployment bad-ass. I've read a lot of his stuff dealing with Nginx, and it's always a good read.
