Speramus

Or is it?

I hate sysadmin work. Some people are cut out for it, but for it’s my least favorite part of the job. In fact, if my life came down to a choice between having to juice the bile out of an angry bear’s gallbladder or do more sysadmin work, I’d pull out the rubber gloves and astroglide with a smile.

Unfortunately, bear-bile-milkologists are illegal and, more importantly, paid poorly. Which means that I try to find as many ways to avoid sysadmin work as possible.

Bundler has been purported as one solution to this. Who doesn’t want to never think about their gems again? No worrying about installing dependencies or having weird versions of gems, just easy, simple, one file configure and go. Right?

Well, mostly. If you’re running on one platform, yeah, it’ll work great. But for those of us who develop on a windows box and deploy to linux? Yeesh, forget about it. You’ll have to manually configure so much it’s hardly worth it.

The problem is platform dependencies. To test on your local box, you’ll need windows gems: mingw32-* whatever’s. But when you try and use bundler to deploy this to your production server, it’ll just port over your windows gems, which will promptly fail on the linux box! Bundler isn’t smart enough to realize that the mingw32 gems, though the satisfy the dependency, aren’t actually working.

The solution I’ve found is just to not lock the gemfile until it’s uploaded on the server then rerun bundler install (if you’re sudoing, bundler install vendor/bundle, unless your webserver runs as root). Hopefully this’ll save someone some time and frustration.