Site maintenance: Rails upgrade

Posted by Andrew Hodgkinson Wed, 24 Jan 2007 21:53:00 GMT

This site runs almost entirely on the Ruby On Rails framework. Rails version 1.2 was recently released and our web host will be upgrading to this shortly. I will endeavour to minimise disruption during the upgrade but you may notice things running a little slowly for a while and might find yourself unexpectedly logged out of a live session because of server restarts.

Technical details

The process goes something like this:

• Perform a complete (rather than incremental) backup.
• Freeze the live Rails applications on their current Rails versions.
• Once the central 1.2 upgrade is complete, use a mirrored development service to unfreeze each individual application and make sure everything still works.
• If all is well the change will go live, else I’ll decide on a case by case basis whether to leave the application frozen on a legacy Rails version or fix whatever problems have shown up.

General opinion suggests that the Rails 1.2 upgrade is less traumatic than people were expecting, but nonetheless it will take a fair amount of effort to complete. Since the site is maintained on a spare time basis, it may take some time. Obviously I’d like the site to be as free of disruption as possible – the uptime is improving after some initial bugs showed up when it went live! – but please bear with us if there are any more significant outages over the next two or three weeks, as we make the transition to this newer framework version.