So now I have a working application. It’s pretty simple, an activerecord model stores the lottery picks, the user enters the current draw, and the resulting display shows the results, as well as any winning lines. I even added a helper to take logic out of the view to handle the formatting of the SPAN elements.  All the layout and formatting is handled through CSS.

Now it’s time to try and deploy it to my hosting service.  At this time I was still with Network Solutions, which had a nifty ZIP deployment procedure for uploading Rails apps.  I create a database in the MySQL admin.  I migrate the data, such that it is, with and SQL export/import. Upload the Rails ZIP, restart the server and…. Failure, 500 error.  I check the logs, they’re empty.  I try to check versions, can’t check the version because I don’t have shell access!  I find that the versions are not the same, so I go back and recreate the app with the version running on Network Solutions, including the gems.  Still getting the 500 error, and nothing in the logs!  I change permissions on the log folder, still nothing in the logs. I determine that the 500 page is the one from my application, so something is working, just not sure where to look.  I manhandle the environment.rb configuration to force everything into development, and suddenly I have log entries.  Aha!  It was running in production all along, and coupled with a permissions issue was the reason I had no logs.  Now I see that I never updated the database.yml config for production, which I had assumed would run in develpment until I implicitly switched it over.  Wrong!  So I update the database.yml file and after a couple of iterations while I determine the correct connection details to the database, I finally get my application running from Network Solutions, accessible over the internet.  “Hello World”, indeed!