Another Tip for Rails on GoDaddy

This tip is more of a hack than anything else. I recently ran into a problem with an app that had been running on GoDaddy for a couple of weeks. Then, out of nowhere, it completely stopped working. You couldn’t access any of the controllers without receiving the dreaded “Rails application failed to start properly” error message. I contacted GoDaddy’s support and their response was:

“Thank you for contacting customer support. Unfortunately we are unable
to provide third party scripting assistance via this forum. We apologize
for any inconvenience this may cause.”

What’s funny about this response is that it’s not the first time I’ve received the “it’s your problem not ours” reply. Of all the times I’ve received this message it HAS been their problem and not a scripting issue. At any rate, after planning around for a few hours I came to realize that the RAILS_GEM_VERSION fix I posted here was actually the problem. Remember that it worked fine and that GoDaddy must have upated something to cause it break.

So to fix the problem you need to either remove the RAILS_GEM_VERSION constant from environment.rb or comment it out. It’s ridiculous to think that this variable can break the entire application, but that’s what happened in this instance.

It’s good to see that GoDaddy has posted a page addressing common problems with Rails applications. You’ll see that it does mention the RAILS_GEM_VERSION update, but if that doesn’t do the trick be sure to try and remove it. It’s worth a shot and on more than one occasion it has worked for me (and others).