Heroku + Rack App + Active Support Timezones - ruby

Question

I have a pretty simple Rack app that's defined in a file called config.ru:
require './environment'
class Ryan
def self.call(env)
[200, { "Content-Type" => "text/html" }, [Time.zone.now]]
end
end
run Ryan
In environment.rb, there's this:
require 'active_support/core_ext/time/zones'
require 'active_support/time_with_zone'
require 'active_support/core_ext/time/conversions'
Time.zone = 'Sydney'
And in the Gemfile:
source "http://rubygems.org"
gem 'rack'
gem 'tzinfo'
gem 'activesupport'
When I run this locally, it works! Huge success.
However, when I deploy this application to Heroku it fails entirely with this showing in the logs:
2012-03-01T02:01:55+00:00 app[web.1]: [2012-03-01 02:01:55] INFO ruby 1.9.2 (2011-07-09) [x86_64-linux]
2012-03-01T02:01:55+00:00 app[web.1]: [2012-03-01 02:01:55] INFO WEBrick 1.3.1
2012-03-01T02:01:55+00:00 app[web.1]: [2012-03-01 02:01:55] INFO WEBrick::HTTPServer#start: pid=1 port=27368
2012-03-01T02:01:56+00:00 heroku[web.1]: State changed from starting to up
2012-03-01T02:01:57+00:00 app[web.1]: [2012-03-01 02:01:57] ERROR NoMethodError: undefined method `now' for nil:NilClass
2012-03-01T02:01:57+00:00 app[web.1]: /app/vendor/bundle/ruby/1.9.1/gems/rack-1.4.1/lib/rack/handler/webrick.rb:59:in `service'
2012-03-01T02:01:57+00:00 app[web.1]: /usr/local/lib/ruby/1.9.1/webrick/httpserver.rb:70:in `run'
2012-03-01T02:01:57+00:00 app[web.1]: /app/config.ru:8:in `call'
2012-03-01T02:01:57+00:00 app[web.1]: /usr/local/lib/ruby/1.9.1/webrick/httpserver.rb:111:in `service'
2012-03-01T02:01:57+00:00 app[web.1]: /usr/local/lib/ruby/1.9.1/webrick/server.rb:183:in `block in start_thread'
So... what's the dealio here? Is Heroku running this in a different kind of process and so that's why it can't be found?

Answer 1

Weird, this did not run for me locally ,
Ruby 1.9.2p180 and gems,
i18n (0.6.0)
multi_json (1.1.0)
activesupport (3.2.1)
rack (1.4.1)
tzinfo (0.3.31)
bundler (1.0.18)
This did,
require './environment'
class Ryan
def self.call(env)
Time.zone = "Sydney"
[200, { "Content-Type" => "text/html" }, [Time.zone.now.to_s]]
end
end
run Ryan
More information on your local environment may shed some light on why is it happenning.

Answer 2

That will work with Thin instead of WEBrick.
Add Thin gem to your Gemfile then create a Procfile:
web: bundle exec thin start -p $PORT
It worked for me on cedar stack.
As to why it did work with Thin and not WEBrick: I don't have a clue!
http://ryan-cedar.herokuapp.com/