Background
Recently, I’ve decided to work with Ruby a little more and I’ve been trying to wrap my head around a number of new things. I’m working to put together a series of posts that will detail my exploration but I ran into a nasty issue and wanted to get something up to help anyone else who falls into this little pit.
Setup
I have been using Heroku in my explorations and have come to truly dig their service. These guys know what the heck their doing and really make me feel like I do as well. Anyway, since I needed a CMS for the project I was working on, I grabbed Radiant and started playing. It worked quite well out of the box for me and was supported on Heroku (directions here) so I installed several of the extensions that I needed and pushed it up to Heroku.
Uh oh. No worky.
I pulled down the logs from Heroku, I sent emails to everyone I could think of, I Googled, I re-pushed (yes, I know that’s the definition of insanity), I even shook my fist at the bash shell but could not get it to work.
Resolution
Along the way, I came to find a couple of rather important pieces of info. Heroku doesn’t support Git on the server side (like git-wiki). And Git has sub-modules. These two important details, and the fact that I was unaware of the previously, is what lead to me to grab a copy of what was on the production server (the bundle command on Heroku) and dissect it. The extension directories were completely empty. Because of the sub-modules, Git wasn’t pushing them to Heroku and so the extensions weren’t loaded. Removing the sub-modules and then adding the files from the extensions, followed by a re-push and I was back in business.
Hope this help.
David O’Hara is a Principal with Improving Enterprises in Dallas, Texas.
Posted by David O'Hara 
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