David Kimura at Drifting Ruby has some good videos on setting Campfire up outside the Once installer. Outside of the 3.3 RC1 and stringio issues, I was running into another issue: I could not generate thumbnails when running on localhost. The thumbnails generated as expected when using Puma Dev. Still, on localhost, they were failing, and worse, I would typically end up with one broken thumbnail variant per thread pool worker.

First, here are my setup steps:

  1. Download the source
  2. Run bin/setup (I had to remove rbenv from this file since I use ASDF these days)
  3. From the rails console, run, WebPush.generate_key and copy the keys into ENV variables VAPID_PUBLIC_KEY and VAPID_PRIVATE_KEY
  4. Add the msgpack gem to my GemFile

With all of this in place, https://campfire.test worked as expected.

However, when starting the server via bundle exec rails server (on an M1 MBP with Sonoma 14.3), the thumbnails of images were missing. I could click on the thumbnails and see them in the lightbox but not in the chat window.

Digging into the database, I could see they were not being analyzed, but I had no idea why.

Then I saw the following in the logs:

1
2

objc[84578]: +[__NSCFConstantString initialize] may have been in progress in another thread when fork() was called.
objc[84578]: +[__NSCFConstantString initialize] may have been in progress in another thread when fork() was called. We cannot safely call it or ignore it in the fork() child process. Crashing instead. Set a breakpoint on objc_initializeAfterForkError to debug.

The thread running ActiveJob running the ActiveStorage Analyze job was crashing.

A little searching led me to this bug thread and a suggestion to set OBJC_DISABLE_INITIALIZE_FORK_SAFETY=YES. A quick server reboot, and everything works as expected.

Before I got here, I also tried disabling cluster mode in Puma, WEB_CONCURRENCY=0 bundle exec rails s, which solved the problem.

I submitted this as a bug to 37Signals. I am not sure if this is just something on my computer or not, so I would try it without these changes first.

Update: 37Signals confirmed this is a known issue. The env variable is actually set in the .pumadev file which is why I did. not see the issue when using Puma Dev.