John Yerhot / Weblog /

Against the advice of, well, the entire Rails community, I attempted to deploy a project to Godaddy.

Godaddy proudly displays the little Ruby logo next to Php when browsing through their hosting plans, and seeing as you can get Rails hosting for $7/month through them, it seems like a decent deal, even if you know it’s gonna get slow.

Baisically, what ends up happening when deploying to Godaddy, is you upload your application to a special directory you create through their control pannel, modify your dispatch.fcgi file, .htaccess files, turn off Java and pray.  Its all supposed to run as FCGI in the end, which is not the speediest way to deploy a Rails app, but is acceptable for smaller, non-demanding applications.

The application I was attempting to deploy was a Rails 2.1 app, and I found that Godaddy is rocking Rails 1.1.6 (Release Aug 2006), so I froze Rails (standard practice), change the configs to point to the manually created database (no rake support here folks) and tried to hit it.  Nothing.  First, every time you modify the .htaccess file (and you will need to - many times) it takes 10-30 minutes for Apache to notice.  So, you’re stuck making a change, waiting, testing, washing and repeating.  If you’re using FCGI, there is literally NO output into the ‘errorlog’ Godaddy gives you, so you have to deploy with regular CGI to get any idea why your application isn’t working and then switch back to FCGI and pray.

Finally, after a couple hours of searching the interwebs and poking and prodding, I was getting somewhere - the error log started to get populated, but FastCGI wasn’t starting correctly.  After some snooping, I saw that Rails 2.1 assumes that you’re not running whatever version of Gem was around in 2006.  Gem was failing with a method not found error when Rails tries to talk to Godaddy’s almost 3 year old version.

I putzed around a bit looking for ways to skip that step of Rails’ boot process, swaping out boot.rb files from older version of Rails, hacking, etc.. and to no avail.

This is where I stopped.  I figured that even if I got past this problem, the version of Rmagick was from mid 2006 and would likely not work with my app, and I wasn’t about to try and get Godaddy to update it.  If they haven’t updated any of the Rails stuff yet, I don’t think they are going to any time soon.

My message for Godaddy is this:  I want the entire day I spend on this back.  You should stop advertising that you support Ruby/Rails when you obviously don’t.  I’d bet 90% of Rails apps in development today would not be able to run on their hosting plans. Eh.