Things I Couldn’t Figure Out Then Figured Out in Ruby On Rails — Part 1

I went to a Ruby hacknight the other night! There, I spent an hour and a half pair-debugging what turned out to be a painfully simple issue.

The issue I was having:

I needed to generate a migration: rails generate migration add_product_url_to_wishlists. But when I would type that into the terminal, I would get the following error:

The answer is definitely in this error message 🤦‍♀

Other behavior:

• rails console produced the same error as the generate migration command.

But:

• rails server ran successfully.

I should mention that my view of the error message was not as it looks above. I have, before now, kept the terminal text large and more readable, which makes the error message broken up and scrollable and perhaps… less readable. I think I may have seen it if I’d looked at it as it’s pictured above. But who knows?!

Here’s what I did to try and fix it:

• Made sure I was using the correct command to generate the migration. I was! Yay.
• Stopped/started the server.
• Ran the migration command with bundle exec.
• Checked my other Rails projects to see if they were having errors. They were not.
• Googled the first couple lines of the error message, which lead me to:

— Comment out bootsnap in my Gemfile. Then uncomment it out.

— Add config.autoload_paths += %W(#{config.root}/lib) to the DressMe module in application.rb. Then delete that line.

Last ditch efforts, I:

• Cleared the cache.
• Bundled.
• Bundle updated.

Lastest ditchest of efforts, I:

• Restarted my computer.

After more googling with my pair, we:

• Did all the things I had previously done, to make sure nothing had fallen through the cracks (he was baffled that rails server worked, but rails console did not.
• Typed which ruby and which rails in the command line to see if we were using the correct versions for the project.
• Stopped Spring with the stop spring command.
• My pair pulled down the repo and we both checked out very old commits* (He got the same errors that I was getting).
• More googling.
• More cache clearing.

Then we talked about the most recent additions I’d made to the app. I had added the auto-links gem a couple days before. It allows urls to be clickable. So, we did a bit more googling and error message reading with auto-links in mind. And then the answer revealed itself.

The error was occurring because… the first few lines of my application.rb file looked like this:

Wrong

Not like this:

Right!

The error was occurring because Ruby was trying to load the rails_autolink gem, which depended on Rails, which hadn’t been loaded yet.

This was fun. I learned things! And we solved the problem together!

1. I learned that I’d like to keep my terminal text size a bit smaller, so I can read the whole error message at once without scrolling.
2. I learned that reading the whole error message can help figure out the… error.
3. I learned that the require order is important in application.rb.
4. I learned how to clear my cache.
5. I learned how to stop Spring, and why we use it or need it.

*It doesn’t make sense to me that even with older commits we were getting the same errors, if I’d added this Gem and line of code only a few days before. If anyone has info about why that would be, please do tell.