awkward silence

It seems that as promised in their announcement of 27 July, DreamHost is now switching the default rails environment over to production. This should be a good thing, but if you have an application that’s currently running in development mode it’s going to be unhappy until you set it straight.

You’ll need to edit environment.rb changing:
RAILSENV = ENV[‘RAILSENV’] || ‘development’
to:

RAILS_ENV  = 'development'

Or the production environment will be selected at the ||=.

In general you should probably stick to doing most development work offline and using DreamHost for production or integration testing. FastCGI is just not very happy about the kinds of errors you’ll be seeing while in developement.