OVERVIEW:

Understanding various ways to debug errors within your Ruby on Rails applications.

This is Part 5 of a series of articles for troubleshooting your Ruby on Rails environment or application. Please see(gs) Ruby on Rails Troubleshooting for additional articles in this series.

Symptoms:

• Ruby on Rails Container crashing
• Ruby applications are unstable or crash
  

Things you will need:

• SSH access to your (gs)
• A basic understanding of the Vim editor

Details:

If your Ruby on Rails applications become sluggish or stop accepting connections altogether you should enable debugging.

To enable debugging of your Rails application in the (gs) Grid Container, follow these steps.

1. Set the debug option by running the following command:

mtr set_option [appname] debug=true

2. Stop and start your application:

mtr stop [appname]
mtr start [appname]

Now your application will generate several files in the log/mongrel_debug directory underneath the application's main directory. For more details on what each of these logs are and how to interpret their contents, see this page (scroll down to SUPER DEBUGGING WITH RAILS).

NOTE: Using debugging will slow your application down tremendously and should not be left on all the time. Be sure to unset the option and stop and start your application once you've discovered the problem.

Revisions:

01-30-2009: Ruby link updated. Thanks for the heads up Amanda W.