on development

Upgrading Rbenv on Ubuntu 14.04

It has been a busy week. I have not had time to work on my side projects, not even to decide a side project for November - so I will keep this short.

It was a week of system upgrades. I upgraded my dev machine (a Macbook Air 11”) to Mac OS X Yosemite and it works really well. I did a clean install of the OS and it runs perfectly so far. I also wanted to upgrade the Devb.io server to the latest version of Ruby (2.1.4).

Last time I had to find parts of the solution on how to upgrade the system on different sites, so I compiled this checklist for myself and if anyone else is helped by it – perfect.

What I am running

  • Nginx
  • Ubuntu 14.04 LTS
  • Ruby via Rbenv (2.1.2)
  • Puma
  • Ruby on Rails (4.1.7)
  • PostgreSQL
  • Capistrano for deploys

System upgrade

A updated system is a good start.

apt-get update && apt-get upgrade

I usually restart the database server after a system upgrade, since I have found that postgres can behave strange if it is not restarted.

sudo /etc/init.d/postgresql restart

Install the new Ruby version

rbenv update && rbenv install 2.1.4

Project settings

In your Rails app you need to modify the Gemfile (just change the Ruby number) and your config/deploy.rb (:rbenv_ruby-type setting) and your local .ruby-version file (done via rbenv local 2.1.4). Commit, run your tests and push to Github/Bitbucket.

Install bundler on the server

Most people use bundler on the server, but it does not come preinstalled with a new Ruby version, so we need to add that. rbenv local 2.1.4 && gem install bundler.

On some setups I needed to install the Ruby web server too, not sure about why since I think this should be handled by bundler. gem install puma in my case.

Stop the web server

Now is the time to put a maintainance page up, or just shut the webapp off for a moment. Capistrano can handle this. On your local machine: bundle exec cap production deploy:stop

You can leave it running, but Capistrano will send a phased restart that will try to use the old Ruby version by default. Stopping it makes sure we use the new ruby version on next start.

Do a deploy

On your local machine: bundle exec cap production deploy

Now, your web app should be running the latest and greatest version of Ruby.