Ruby on Rails not rendering views when downgrading from version 3 to 2

Question

I am in the middle of putting up my Ruby on Rails app to a live server but have to downgrade from version 3 to 2 because that is all my shared hosting provider supports. I was able to adapt my models, controllers and routes without much problem. The problem I am having is with the views rendering.

I went through the process of creating a default layout for each controller as Rails 2 requires. When I run the app on the server, it starts just fine and the smokescreen index.html is visible but if I delete that and try to see the real app, all I get are broken links and files that are unable to load according to the browser.

I am sure this is an issue due to the downgrade. Any ideas on what I am doing wrong?

Answer 1

Doing a downgrade from Rails 3 to Rails 2 seems to me like a crazy thing to do for many reasons:

1) Rails 4 is already released. You should be looking to upgrade instead of downgrading.

2) There are many hosts out there that offer amazing services and even some free. Heroku is a great place to start if you don't want to manage your own server.

3) Rails 3 was almost a complete rewrite of the way Rails worked. This includes the addition of the Assets Pipeline which is a blessing in terms of development.

With that said, if you're still looking to downgrade, I would try to revert the steps found in many Upgrading Rails 2 to Rails 3 tutorials out there.

They are a bit long and many steps required to put here but a simple google search will yield many great resources. Here's a Railscasts http://railscasts.com/episodes/226-upgrading-to-rails-3-part-2