Runnig Rake tasks on production server failes due to ExecJS

Question

I have a Rails 4 application installed on RHEL 6 machine.

The production uses Passenger and Apache2.

Lately I've been trying to integrate Rake tasks into production as a scheduled job using Whenever Gem and Cron.

Whenever I try to run in production one of these Rake tasks, I get the following error:

rake aborted!
ExecJS::RuntimeUnavailable: Could not find a JavaScript runtime. See https://github.com/sstephenson/execjs for a list of available runtimes.

It is important to mention the NodeJS was installed on the machine. I can precompile assets, and so on. Specifically, the command node --version produces: v0.10.31

Here's my stack trace:

  rake aborted!
    ExecJS::RuntimeUnavailable: Could not find a JavaScript runtime. See https://github.com/sstephenson/execjs for a list of available runtimes.
    /var/www/eng_performance/shared/bundle/ruby/2.0.0/gems/execjs-2.2.1/lib/execjs/runtimes.rb:51:in `autodetect'
    /var/www/eng_performance/shared/bundle/ruby/2.0.0/gems/execjs-2.2.1/lib/execjs.rb:5:in `<module:ExecJS>'
    /var/www/eng_performance/shared/bundle/ruby/2.0.0/gems/execjs-2.2.1/lib/execjs.rb:4:in `<top (required)>'
    /var/www/eng_performance/shared/bundle/ruby/2.0.0/gems/activesupport-4.0.4/lib/active_support/dependencies.rb:229:in `require'
    /var/www/eng_performance/shared/bundle/ruby/2.0.0/gems/activesupport-4.0.4/lib/active_support/dependencies.rb:229:in `block in require'
    /var/www/eng_performance/shared/bundle/ruby/2.0.0/gems/activesupport-4.0.4/lib/active_support/dependencies.rb:214:in `load_dependency'
    /var/www/eng_performance/shared/bundle/ruby/2.0.0/gems/activesupport-4.0.4/lib/active_support/dependencies.rb:229:in `require'
    /var/www/eng_performance/shared/bundle/ruby/2.0.0/gems/uglifier-2.5.3/lib/uglifier.rb:3:in `<top (required)>'
    /home/deploy/.rvm/gems/ruby-2.0.0-p481/gems/bundler-1.7.2/lib/bundler/runtime.rb:76:in `require'
    /home/deploy/.rvm/gems/ruby-2.0.0-p481/gems/bundler-1.7.2/lib/bundler/runtime.rb:76:in `block (2 levels) in require'
    /home/deploy/.rvm/gems/ruby-2.0.0-p481/gems/bundler-1.7.2/lib/bundler/runtime.rb:72:in `each'
    /home/deploy/.rvm/gems/ruby-2.0.0-p481/gems/bundler-1.7.2/lib/bundler/runtime.rb:72:in `block in require'
    /home/deploy/.rvm/gems/ruby-2.0.0-p481/gems/bundler-1.7.2/lib/bundler/runtime.rb:61:in `each'
    /home/deploy/.rvm/gems/ruby-2.0.0-p481/gems/bundler-1.7.2/lib/bundler/runtime.rb:61:in `require'
    /home/deploy/.rvm/gems/ruby-2.0.0-p481/gems/bundler-1.7.2/lib/bundler.rb:133:in `require'
    /var/www/eng_performance/releases/20141014084554/config/application.rb:7:in `<top (required)>'
    /var/www/eng_performance/releases/20141014084554/Rakefile:4:in `require'
    /var/www/eng_performance/releases/20141014084554/Rakefile:4:in `<top (required)>'
    (See full trace by running task with --trace)

Note: I've installed NodeJS as a compilation from source, because when I tried to install from the repo I got this error that I didn't know how to overcome:

Packages skipped because of dependency problems:
    c-ares19-1.9.1-5.el6.3.x86_64 from epel
    http-parser-2.0-4.20121128gitcd01361.el6.x86_64 from epel
    1:libuv-0.10.28-1.el6.x86_64 from epel
    nodejs-0.10.30-1.el6.x86_64 from epel
    1:v8-3.14.5.10-11.el6.x86_64 from epel

Could you check if `gem 'therubyracer'` is uncommented in your Gemfile? — R Milushev, Oct 14 '14 at 19:24
@RMilushev, thanks for the reply. As far as I understand, using therubyracer isn't recommended as to performance issues. I've found more than one thread like this: [rubyracer vs nodejs](http://stackoverflow.com/q/14829275/3001256). Are you aware to those issues? Were there any changes in some of the new versions of this gem? — cyber101, Oct 15 '14 at 06:09
I have bad experience with `nodejs` on my production Debian Linux server. It has to be installed in a very special way and we've decided to rely on `therubyracer` gem. I don't think there are performance issues, since it is a V8 js machine warper, nothing more or less. — R Milushev, Oct 15 '14 at 10:52

score 5 · Accepted Answer · edited May 23 '17 at 12:02

5

Well, finally, I was able to solve this :)

As it turns out, no was nothing wrong with node.js installation, but with the reference to it.

I have no idea why this was changed in the first place, but following this post solved the problem- i.e. by adding the symlink ln -s /usr/local/bin/node /usr/bin/node.

Note: I'm pretty sure that the symlink isn't the best practice. If there's anyone who can suggest another idea- I'd love to hear it..

Hopefully this was the last error I'll get with node.js. If another errors such as this will occur, therubyracer will provide an excellent backup solution.

edited May 23 '17 at 12:02

Community

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answered Oct 15 '14 at 10:52

cyber101

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Could someone comment why we even need JS env on production when we can use a web server to serve stuff precompiled in the first place, let alone a rake task that likely doesn't even need anything JS. – mlt Aug 31 '21 at 18:29

Runnig Rake tasks on production server failes due to ExecJS

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