We were in the middle of a Rails upgrade at work along with updating various gems to help ease that upgrade.

Somewhere down the line after doing various updates to the different gems and switching back and forth between git branches, zeus would hang on start with just the output of

exit status 1

If I tried to run any of the zeus subcommands, they would hang and be completely unresponsive until I shut down zeus.

It turned out the problem was all of the bundle updates and bundle installs as part of upgrading the project was the culprit. It would seem that all of the different versions of the gems lying around were confusing zeus.

A simple run of bundle clean --force and voilà, zeus start was able to go about its business as normal.

And a tip of the hat to the full answer found here on stackoverflow.com, which includes additional steps you can try if just running the bundle clean --force doesn’t fix your issue.