Rails routes change in production

Question

The situation is simple. In Rails 2.3.3, I've got a "Staff" namespace, and controllers in there inherit from the StaffController. That StaffController itself handles the Staff namespace's root:

map.namespace :staff do |staff|
  staff.root  :controller=>'staff',
              :action=>'index'
  # ...
end

In development mode, that works fine. In production mode, however, this breaks:

uninitialized constant Staff::StaffController

among other issues, such as certain helpers rendering incorrectly in the Staff namespace.

Why do development and production mode act behave differently in this context, and what can I do to fix it?

Answer 1

What does your production environment look like? Passenger/Apache? Latest version (2.2.4)? Inconsistencies like that have typically been a stack problem for me as opposed to a code problem, so couldn't hurt to start there.

Answer 2

What happens if you run rake routes in both production and development modes?

That might help you narrow it down to (as bensie mentioned) a hosting stack vs. framework/code issue.

Answer 3

It seems you've solved this already, but two things to watch out for:

1. Some subtle changes can happen when using Apache vs Webrick/Mongrel (best practice would be to actually setup Apache+Passenger locally for development

2. In certain deployment situations you can shoot yourself in the foot when you implement a conditional route and make a db migration happen at the same time (best practice would be to wrap the conditional route in a check for the DB migration. This may mean that you need to do a second restart of your server after load and migration, but still better than the alternative.