Update: You can now use the debugger gem to circumvent this issue. Or better yet, use pry
I’ve been working in a development environment that required an earlier verison of Ruby (1.8.7) that worked well with the ruby-debug gem. This gem is widly used and has some nice “get to know it” text in the rails guides.
However, as I moved to a better environment to develop some playground applications with the latest and greatest Ruby and Rails, I ran into a snag when attempting to use ruby-debug.
As is turns out, the original ruby-debug gem is not compatible with Ruby 1.9.x, and you must instead use ruby-debug19. However, ruby-debug19’s dependencies are not quite up to speed on 1.9.3 quite yet and you need to perform a workaround.
This stack overflow question and it’s top answer hold the solution (mostly). The problem is that the gems files of two dependencies of ruby-debug19, linecache19 and ruby-debug-base19, aren’t yet compatible with 1.9.3, at least not their current public facing versions. You have to download and install the latest version from rubyforge manually.
Here are the steps:
- Install ruby-debug19 (gem install ruby-debug19). This will also download & install its dependencies, but you’ll need to download updated versions of two of them first.
- Download linecache19-0.5.13.gem and ruby-debug-base19-0.11.26.gem from the URL listed here
- Install both of those gems (gem install linecache19-0.5.13.gem ruby-debug-base19-0.11.26.gem – –with-ruby-include=$rvm_path/src/ruby-1.9.3-p0/) BUT MAKE SURE TO REPLACE THE RUBY PATCH LEVEL WITH YOURS. See your exact version with `ruby -v`. The original bash commands were created when 1.9.3 first came out, but it has since received several patch releases
- You should now have two versions of linecache19 and ruby-debug-base19 installed and ready for use.
- Now you can include the ‘ruby-debug19’ gem in your project’s Gemfile:
gem ‘ruby-debug19’, :require => ‘ruby-debug’ - Make sure to use `bundle install` or `bundle update` to refresh Gemfile.lock to use the proper, latest versions of our two Gemfile dependencies.
That should be it! To make sure it’s working, try starting Mongrel with `rails s –debugger`. It should let you know that the server was started with debugging capabilities.
If I missed anything important or misinformed, please let me know in the comments.