This week, while working on a personal project, I ran into an error that ended up teaching me a bit more about computer processors, so I figured I’d share my findings!

Problem:

While redeploying my web app to Render.com, I encountered the following error:
"Your bundle only supports platforms ["arm64-darwin-21"] but your local platform is x86_64-linux."

Explanation:

This error occurred because the platform my development machine is running on is different from the platform required by Render. Here’s a breakdown:

"arm64-darwin-21":

"arm64": Refers to the ARM 64-bit architecture used in Macs with M1 or M2 chips.
"darwin": Refers to the operating system, which is macOS in this case.
"21": Indicates the version of macOS, specifically macOS 12 (Monterey).

"x86_64-linux":

"x86_64": Refers to the 64-bit extension of the original x86 architecture, which is widely used in Intel and AMD processors.
"linux": Refers to the Linux operating system.

In other words, Render.com is running Linux on an x86_64 architecture, while my development environment is on a Mac with an ARM64 architecture. The error is occurring because the bundle created for macOS (arm64-darwin-21) is not compatible with the Linux (x86_64) environment on Render.

Solution:

To resolve this, I had to add support for the x86_64-linux platform to my bundle, so I used this command:

bundle lock --add-platform x86_64-linux

This command updates the lock file to include x86_64-linux, allowing Render to use this platform specification instead of trying to use the macOS-specific arm64-darwin-21.