Troubleshooting fcgi and the dreaded undefined method `require_gem’ error
Thursday, October 9th, 2008It happens to the best of us. We’ve coded our app go to deploy it and encounter some dispatch.fcgi issue. Today was the turn of
dispatch.fcgi error: undefined method `require_gem' for main:Object (NoMethodError)
Well way to troubleshoot and arrive at a solution is to actually run ./dispatch.fcgi. I didn’t know you could do this! It’s well handy! If you are on a remote server to which you don’t have ssh access then you can probably still run it as a cron job. Something like cd /path/to/my/app/public && ./dispatch.fcgi should do it. Remember that the dispatch.fcgi file is in the public directory of your application. The combination of running ./dispatch.fcgi and viewing the Rails log file revealed the useful error message above. Then a quick google search revealed that we need to change require_gem to simply gem (see here).
I had to change this in the dispatch.fcgi and then grepped the whole application directory for any instances of require_gem and changed them to gem too.
