“...I've been working since 2008 with Ruby / Ruby on Rails, love a bit of Elixir / Phoenix and learning Rust. I also poke through other people's code and make PRs for OpenSource Ruby projects that sometimes make it. Currently working for InPay...”

Rob Lacey (contact@robl.me)
Senior Software Engineer, Brighton, UK

Ruby 1.8.7 and Rails 1.2

We have recently been looking at hiring so I created a stupid question just to get a developer talking. When I first started working with Rails we were building Euro-reg.com with Ruby 1.8.6 and Rails 1.2.3 as far as I can recall. So the question ended up being…

Suppose we hired you and on day one said we have this Rails 1.2 Application on Ruby 1.8.7, using SQLite in production that is mission critical. How would you approach bringing it up to date?

Some feedback we got was “…Rails v1.0—2.1 are incompatible with Ruby v1.8.7…” which made me question my stupid question. Actually it’s been so long I can’t even remember. So 10 minutes later.

The flow was

  • install 1.8.7 under rvm
  • this installs Rubygems 2.0, so you need to revert that to 1.8
  • edit config/boot.rb and replace require_gem with gem

That was nicely quick, I guess it could have been horrible.