This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Ruby Buzz by Christopher Williams. Original Post: Getting Capistrano to play with Oracle on Red Hat Enterprise Linux Feed Title: Late to the Party Feed URL: http://cwilliams.textdriven.com/xml/rss20/feed.xml Feed Description: Ruby. Rails. Stuff. Latest Ruby Buzz Posts Latest Ruby Buzz Posts by Christopher Williams Latest Posts From Late to the Party

I've been working on an internal project that connects to a legacy Oracle database. The process of getting the driver and client set up was a bit annoying, but I'd done it before and I managed to get through it again. (For those of you braving it, be sure you don't include a trailing slash on your ORACLE_HOME environment variable).

The Oracle driver and client are like most Oracle products - unnecessarily complex. One of its requirements is that you set an ORACLE_HOME environment variable. I'd managed to do this and add it to my .bashrc file so that when I manually logged into the app server via SSH I could get the rails app up and running. The problems was that remotely deploying via Capistrano was causing errors - anything that loaded the rails framework, and therefore the Oracle driver, would die with a stack trace about an undefined method. Luckily in my past troubles with the driver, I knew that meant that it didn't have the ORACLE_HOME environment variable set.

In case anyone else is running into this (or I do again), here's a patch:

First, add the following to your deploy.rb recipe:

set :use_sudo, false

Next, modify your capistrano/actor.rb file to force all run commands through bash with BASH_ENV set:

alias :run_without_env :run
def run(cmd, options={}, &block)
  cmd = <<-CMD
  BASH_ENV=.bashrc /bin/bash -c -- "#{cmd}"
  CMD
  run_without_env cmd, options, &block
end

These two changes will force the environment to be loaded and also make all command be run as the original user (which should have rights to do so).

You can read more about it on the Google group for Capistrano