I have a site that has a lot of images (+ 10k) with several hundreds displayed by pages, so I use the principle of ruby on rails assets to compile these images. The problem is that my client has the possibility to change these images via an FTP and it forces me to connect each time in ssh to the server to launch the command "assets: precompile". Would there be a way to create a link button my client will click to launch the command from the code.
I tried to create a cron job with the Whenever gem (https://github.com/javan/whenever) that runs the "assets: precompile" command every hour but it does not work.
every :hour do
rake "assets:precompile"
end
I tried to create this method linked to a link but without success also
def compile_image
system('rvm use 2.2.0#project && cd /var/www/project-folder/ && rake assets:precompile')
redirect_to imports_index_path, notice: 'Images compiled'
end
I'm on ruby 2.2 and rails 4.2.
Thanks for your help
Asset compilation should only be used for static images used in your app (icons, backgrounds...), not for the actual data your site uses.
This is especially true if it is a dynamic and large collection of images.
This isn't really a programming problem anymore, it's more of a general software engineering problem, but here are my two cents anyways.
I'd suggest you use a CDN to make the photos available to browsers. Your Rails app should store (or build) the URLs to the CDN, so that the client browser can fetch and display them.
For instance, set up a HTTP server such as Nginx on the same machine that hosts the FTP server, then build a consistent URL schema so that your FTP files can be served through HTTP, without copy.
New files added to the server via FTP are automatically available through HTTP, and maybe a cron job or an asynchronous worker can check for new files and register them to your Rails app.
Of course, that's just an example of what can be done. There are tons of other solutions, but without further details, it's hard to tell.
Related
Is it possible to deploy Ruby on Rails app on FTP?
If possible then how run migration on it?
My app also have a cronjob. How to set it?
How I deploy my webiste on FTP?
If any tutorial etc availble?
Technically it is possible to deploy by FTP, but the question is, why would you want to? It's a nightmare when compared to a modern, automated deployment system. There's also serious security concerns since FTP is not in any way encrypted and is extremely easy to crack into. Using public Wi-Fi exposes you to the risk of your credentials being captured.
The traditional way to deploy a Rails application is with Capistrano which handles packaging up your application through your version control system and rolling it on to your production system.
If you're not using a version control system that's the first thing you need to fix. Hacking away on files randomly and throwing them to a server over FTP produces quick results but over time it makes it very difficult to get a consistent, tested, reliable build over to your target server.
Remember that Rails is not something that runs automatically like .php files can be, you'll need to use something like Passenger to handle launching your application.
If all this seems a bit convoluted, it's worth trying Heroku to get started. They have a very streamlined approach.
If I understand right what you are asking (is it possible to run Ruby program using only FTP as a protocol), the answer is no, it is not possible. Ruby files is not Web static content (HTML, JS, CSS) that is executed in a browser and hence you can just upload it somewhere (as an option using FTP) and then access via Web. In case of Ruby, apart from uploading content you need to execute commands there (start interpreter, rake etc.) and this is not possible to do using plain FTP.
Normally you may want to use SSH channel to the deployment server to run the program after it has been uploaded. In that case upload is possible via FTP, but as well secure version of it, SFTP (or SCP to just copy files between local and remote machines).
Hope it helps.
As the quantity of our pages increases, the number of images in the rails project has increased greatly. Does anyone have a good strategy for keeping track of these images?
We have experimented with a couple ideas but nothing seems to solve everything. Here are the high level requirements we have come up with:
Images should be available to any developer locally (given they have code access).
Updated images can be automatically sent to amazon s3 (and out to cloud front) on deploy
An easy way to "expire" an image when it changes forcing browsers to download instead of using a cached version
We actually deployed a Rake Task to archive this and keep all the files between our application and (in our case) Cloudfiles in sync.
The rake tasks checks for new files or files that have been changed and uploads them to Cloudfiles. If a developer adds an asset, they can just run the rake task and update the cloud. They also check in the file into our version control so other dev's have access to it.
I've been using Wordpress for awhile, it's installed on my own server, and one of the features I most love about it is how every time there is a new version it alerts you within the app's web-based admin and with one click I can upgrade the app. I don't have to get anywhere near a console.
Personally I wouldn't mind updating manually, but I can see how this could significantly affect the adoption of a piece of software. I'm working on creating a full-featured ruby on rails forum software and I would love to figure out how to include this feature. Any ideas if this could be done with rails?
Could a rails app modify it's own files? If it did, would the server need to be restarted?
To complicate things further, what if the app was deployed from a repo. Could the rails app check in a commit of itself after updating?
Maybe packaging the core of the app as a gem would be simpler? Then maybe the upgrade would not actually modify the rails MVC stack (the rails app would just be super-basic), instead if the forum was all contained within a gem then all it has to do is trigger a 'gem update [name]'. If this occurred, I don't think the Gemfile would even need to be updated. Would a server restart even be required to load the updated gem?
Ideas or feedback on any of this?
Rails files can be modified and even deleted on production - in my case aplication is still working unchanged as all classes are cached in memory. It means Rails instances must be restarted to take new change.
I suppose WordPress is Perl via CGI and you just drop application into web directory to have it working immediately - same with updates - just overwrite files and Apache picks them up immediately.
In case of Rails is that you don't know target deployment architecture thus restarting application may not be trivial. E.g. with passenger I can just do touch tmp\restart.txt and then all instances are killed and started again. Some deployments may need init.d script restart invocation.
Maybe you could recommend or prepare a ready to use deployment model which supports autoupdate. In other cases users could do updates manually.
I posted this very same item on SERVERFAULT, but got no reply. So here goes:
I'm currently in the process of finishing up a Rails application. I am using Warbler to package it up as a ".war" file and am using GlassFish to deploy it. I do this because the application is to be distributed to companies for in-house use. Arguably i could/should have used another framework to develop an application of this nature, however, I chose ease/speed of development over deployment hassle.
That said, I've got the setup working reasonably well on my development machine. However, I'm curious as to how to go about automating environment initialization. In other words, I need to figure out how to ensure that all DBs, files,etc. are configured upon deployment.
All of the examples I've seen thus far assume you're running your IDE on the system to which you wish to deploy and they have you run your rake tasks manually before deployment. However I need to simply give the end user the ".war" and be able to run all rake tasks upon application deployment/launch.
Can someone point me in the right direction regarding this? FWIW there is nothing in the Glassfish manual about environment initialization etc. -- then again, I don't suppose I should expect them to cover every single aspect of deployment.
Best.
Depending on your database requirements you can embed Derby within the Glassfish environment. You can easily create a blank/default database and then put that clean version in each Glassfish environment you have to set up.
I'm not sure what else you need to configure and initialize, but I'd say that if you can, script it up, either with some rake tasks. Embedding Derby takes care of database startup and initialization. Remember that a war file is just a zip file, so adding config files via a script shouldn't be so hard. You can use rails initializers (/config/initializers/) to load up yml files for configuration or whatever you need to do as the app starts up.
You won't be able to have the intializers create the schema in the database, but you could have them check for default seed data and put it in if it isn't there.
You should be able to access any part of the file system that Glassfish and the JVM can access. I don't know much about Glassfish but the only problems I've had with jruby rails apps on Tomcat were related to relative paths being relative to where the startup script was called from, and not always relative to the installation root. This could probably be solved with the right startup scripts in Tomcat or setting the appropriate start-in folder, I just haven't had a need to dive in to that very much.
I just look up at rails sources and find folder named "dispatches". There is four file in it. I want to know purpose of this files. I know I use this files on my production server, but I never used to think of their purpose. I know there is something about attaching Rails app to Apache server. On my production server rails appname command add this files to public folder automatically. Can I set up this behavior on my development machine?
The rails dispatcher is the entry point for a rails application and is used to bootstrap the environment.
They have a long history and in a lot of ways they are almost obsolete. In days gone by rails apps used to be powered using cgi or fastcgi, which was a way for the webserver to communicate with a rails process. The boot process would be initiated by dispatch.fcgi or dispatch.cgi. Nowadays people are more likely to use apache/nginx+passenger or apache/nginx+mongrel/thin. (Does anyone still use lighttpd?)
I'm a little fuzzy on how dispatch.rb is used, but I think it's used by upstream rails servers such as mongrel/thin to bootstrap the rails process. However, now that rails is rack compatible I'm not entirely sure if that has changed.
You don't need to pay the dispatch.* files any attention.
I hope this helps.