Why you should freeze Rails on a shared host environment

Posted on 31 March 2006

When you upload your site you need to run the freeze gems rake command. Freeze is cool according to David Heinemeier Hansson and it will ensure your site doesn't break if your host upgrades rails before you've had a chance to test it.

rake freeze_gems

Freezing your Rails basically puts the framework into vendor/rails instead of floating with whatever gems that are installed on the host.

Interestingly David has promised "The next version of Rails will by default extract the version of Rails it was created with into vendor/rails." So freezing your gems manually may only be around for a little while but it makes a lot of sense.

Remember that with your app using a fixed version of Rails you have to unfreeze it and freeze it again if your host has upgraded and you want to take advantage of the new Rails version.

rake unfreeze_rails

Update 09/06/07

Note that those two methods have now been deprecated. Whilst they still currently work you will get warning messages.

You should now be using:

rake rails:freeze:gems

rake rails:unfreeze

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