Rails

“Rails 3.0 has been underway for a good two years, so it’s with immense pleasure that we can declare it’s finally here. We’ve brought the work of more than 1,600 contributors together to make everything better, faster, cleaner, and more beautiful.”

Riding Rails: Rails 3.0: It’s ready!

On to the news: beginning today, the Merb team will be working with the Rails core team on a joint project. The plan is to merge in the things that made Merb different. This will make it possible to use Rails 3 for the same sorts of use-cases that were compelling for Merb users. Effectively, Merb 2 is Rails 3.

Katz Got Your Tongue? » Rails and Merb Merge.

Great news!

If you like me still use subversion for your own rails projects but you want to use all the latest and coolest rails plugins that are hosted in a git repository you need to do as follows.

Start with installing git. If you use OS X you can download an installer here.

After you’ve done that use the following line to clone the remote git repository in your local vendor/plugins directory.

git clone --depth 1 git://github.com/fauna/has_many_polymorphs.git vendor/plugins/has_many_polymorphs

Change the address to the git repository and the name of the directory under vendor/plugins to fit your needs. In the above example I got the has_many_polymorphs plugin from github.

The checked out directory can then be added to your subversion repository like all other files. If you later want to update the plugin all you have to do is enter the directory and execute.

git pull

This ‘Using Git like svn:externals’ article helped me figure this out.

Future versions of Rails will ship with a minimalistic, yet powerful I18n/L10n api baked in.

The following post is about technical api and implementation details. You can read more about the motivation and reasoning behind this work here.

The Ruby on Rails I18n core api – artweb design .

At times it is useful to easily be able to copy the content of the production database to the database running on your local development machine. In my case I use mysql on the production server and sqlite on my MacBook Pro. Unfortunately the use of different database servers makes this task a bit more tricky.

With a bit of googling I found a bit of code here and there which I combined and modified and turned into the following snippet of code to be dropped into your Capistrano deploy.rb file.


desc "Copy production database to development database"
task :update_dev_db, :roles => :db do
db = YAML::load(ERB.new(IO.read(File.join(File.dirname(FILE), 'database.yml'))).result)['production']

filename = “#{db[‘database’]}_dump.#{Time.now.strftime ‘%Y%m%dT%:%H%M%S’}.sql”
remote_path = “#{current_path}/tmp/#{filename}”
local_path = “tmp/#{filename}”

on_rollback { run “rm #{remote_path}” }

run “mysqldump -u #{db[‘username’]} –password=#{db[‘password’]} –skip-opt #{db[‘database’]} –complete-insert=true –skip-quote-names –no-create-info > #{remote_path}” do |ch, stream, data|
puts data
end

get remote_path, local_path

converted = File.read(local_path).gsub(/\’/, ‘\’\”)
File.open(“#{local_path}_converted”, ‘w’) {|f| f.write(converted)}

system “sqlite3 db/dev.db < #{local_path}_converted”
system “rm #{local_path}”
system “rm #{local_path}_converted”
run “rm #{remote_path}”
end

There is a small problem with \n (new line) characters that on the production server get evaluated as they should. However, on the development machine after the data has been exported from mysql and imported into the sqlite database the \n characters will show as \n on the screen. But for me this is good enough for now.

If you’re eager to learn how to use all the new features in Rails 2.1, Carlos Brando just released a free book titled Ruby on Rails 2.1, What’s New?.

Free Rails 2.1 Book

I’ve used nginx with php through fastcgi for the php sites and with a mongrel cluster for each rails application on this machine for quite some time now and I’ve been happy with that setup.

However, with the number of rails applications increasing, the number of mongrel instances running increases even faster as each application needs between 2 and 5 mongrel instances.

I see Phusion Passenger (a.k.a mod_rails for Apache) as a way to simplify my setup. Passenger is supposed to do the same magic with Apache for rails as mod_php does for php.

The first step towards this dream setup was to change back from nginx to apache2. As I’ve had to have apache running behind ssl for the subversion repository changing back just meant figuring out how to configure apache to proxy for the mongrel clusters but a bit of googling solved that pretty quickly.

So right now this site is yet again powered by Apache but I’m still running mongrels to serve the rails applications. The next step is to move over to passenger, which I hope to do before the weekend.

I’ll let you know how it goes.