I've been deploying Rails since v 2, and never with Docker. The only time I ever had trouble was setting up Rails dev on M1 Mac when M1 was new. In Linux production, it just worked; and pulling/building gems was less a drag than what people regularly experience in the NPM world.
To be fair, I don't use a ton of gems because I generally don't like additional dependencies unless the value is really there. So maybe my use cases have been too basic to experience the pain.
I mean, it isn't a big deal, just few packages need to be installed, just compared to "put a blob on server, run" it's more complex. It's all fine if you use any kind of configuration management as it is just write once in manifest and done.
But if you just install it directly via package manager, leave alone and need to say reinstall server or something, the knowledge is lost.
I remember having a lot of ping-pong between ruby devs where they, well, didn't note down what system libs and dev package they needed, just had them installed locally at some point and forgot about, then surprise when app isn't compiling on server.
I've been deploying Rails since v 2, and never with Docker. The only time I ever had trouble was setting up Rails dev on M1 Mac when M1 was new. In Linux production, it just worked; and pulling/building gems was less a drag than what people regularly experience in the NPM world.
To be fair, I don't use a ton of gems because I generally don't like additional dependencies unless the value is really there. So maybe my use cases have been too basic to experience the pain.