I've inherited a Rails 3.2 production environment which is 'humming' away nicely.
The client now wants another major piece of work doing but I want to do it in Rails 5. The web address would be the same for both the old site and the new project. The new project would be additional functionality which would be accessed via the old site.
Any one know of a way of keeping the old site running whilst I develop and deliver the new work via Rails 5? Eventually if this all works then I get the opportunity to migrate the old site to Rails 5. However for the moment I need to serve up both Rails 3.2 and Rails 5 from the same site.
It's possible to do what you describe with a reverse proxy, e.g. nginx, configured to serve from different web servers based on different paths on the same host. This answer has some details on how to do that. We would need to know how your website is hosted in order to give more details on exactly how to do that.
However, there are other concerns that come up when you start separating your apps which you may not have considered. For example, if your website allows users to log in, do you want them to still be logged in when they visit the new site? To do so transparently will require sharing the session cookie, which this post describes a bit (you'll need to use the same secret key for both apps, or use a remote session store like Memcached). I'm not sure if it'll work properly when shared between Rails 3.2 and 5, though.
As a final note, breaking up your monolithic app into a distributed system is never a decision to take lightly. It would likely end up being less work, and less overall architectural overhead, to simply invest the time in upgrading from 3.2 -> 4.0 -> 4.2 -> 5.0.
Personally I wouldn't touch that old app and its server, especially if the client is happy. Deploying the new app to a new server or a container service like heroku is something you should consider.
Related
I was recently building an internal business database web app using Ruby on Rails 4 and Postgres. The plan was to make the app available to all our employees using Devise for authentication and hosting on Heroku.
Toward the end of development, a request was made to include some highly sensitive information in the app including social security numbers, etc. Thus, instead of heavily worrying about online security we are planning to make this app only run locally on one Mac and not have it available online. The app will only be used about 5 times a month by one person. Instead of requiring that person to launch a postgres server and a webserver via terminal (such as "rails server"), is there a way to package the entire Rails web app and database in to an application so it could be run similar to other OSX apps?
If anyone knows a PC solution instead, that is also a (less preferred) option.
At this point, we realize we should have developed a xcode app, but now that the development is mostly complete with some tricky UI, we would rather not have to recreate the functionality in xcode.
Though I haven't used it myself, what your describing sounds pretty close to what Rubymotion offers
this is probably strange question but I wanted to make rails app that would function as regular desktop app.
I'm making regular web app, but I will have admin function where I manage clients. I'm not very confident with security of my app and I will be only one who uses it so I thought maybe I can use this part of code only on my windows machine.
I figured it out because I don't have SSL certificate and I wouldn't want to put something on web if i will be only one who uses it.
I also know that Rails is webframework, but is is only framework i know how to work with.
I have built two rails apps that need to communicate and send files between each other. For example one rails app would send a request to view a table in the other apps' database. The other app would then render json of that table and send it back. I would also like one app to send a text file stored in its public directory to the other app's public directory.
I have never done anything like this so I don't even know where to begin. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks!
You requirement is common for almost all the web apps irrespective of rails, Communicating with each other is required by most modern web apps. But there is a small understanding that you need to get hold on,
Web sites should not directly access each others internal data (such as tables), (even if they are build by the same language (in this case Rails) by the same developer),
That is where the web-services comes in to play, So you should expose your data through web services so that not only rails application can consume that, but also any app that knows how to consume a web service will get benefit.
Coming back to your question with Rails, rails supports REST web services out of the box, So do some googling about web services, REST web services with rails
HTH
As a starting point, look at ActiveResource.
Railscast
docs
Message queuing systems such as RabbitMQ may be used to communicate things internally between different apps such as a "mailer" app and a main "hub" application.
Alternatively, you can use a shared connection to something like redis stick things onto a "queue" in one app and read them for processing from the other.
In recent Rails versions, it is rather easy to develop API only applications. In the Rails core master, there was even a special application type for these apps briefly (until it got yanked again). But it is still available as a plugin and probably one day becomes actually part of Rails core again. See http://blog.wyeworks.com/2012/4/20/rails-for-api-applications-rails-api-released for more information.
To actually develop and maintain the API of the backend service and make sure both backend and frontend have the same understanding of the resources, you can use ROAR which is great way to build great APIs.
Generally, you should fully define your backend application with an API. Trying to be clever and to skip some of the design steps will only bring you headaches in the long run...
Check out Morpheus. It lets you create RESTful services and use familiar ActiveRecord syntax in the client.
I'd like to gradually transition an app from old java to a new rails app. The data flow would look like
user -> browser -> new rails -> old java
That is, the new rails app would function as a reverse proxy to the old app, and the user would never be the wiser of the original app.
As more functionality is migrated to the rails app, the java app would become used less and less.
I'm familiar with the Net::HTTP classes for requesting resources from the other app, but most examples are overly simplified, and don't facilitate the transition. A full featured gem would be able to
handle common HTTP verbs
pass and retain cookies
rewrite HTML from the old app (for instance, the old app will have
href="/something/foo.html", and the new app would have
"/newpath/bar.html")
have configurable session awareness (associate a sessionID on the
java app with the rails session, such that if you delete the rails session,
it could callback to the java app with a logout)
Performance is not a big concern.
Any pointers to such a gem? It would probably be classified as some sort of reverse proxy, man -in-the-middle, filter, etc
I would suggest not doing this in Rails itself, but rather doing it in directly in your webserver (e.g. Apache)
I have been working on a large project to migrate a Java website to Ruby, and have been using Apache mod_rewrite and mod_proxy for this purpose.
So the flow was
user -> browser -> apache -> passenger or Tomcat
Using modules within Apache itself meant that we did not need to use any of the Rails stack (and associated CPU/memory/threads). It also allowed us to meet one of your requirements to ensure that "the user would never be the wiser of the original app"
Session management is the only tricky part to this; I introduced a cookie that the Java and Rails app could both read, and used the presence of the cookie to tell Ruby or Java if the user was logged in. This way, Ruby and Java did not need to try to manage each other's sessions.
Hope some of that proves helpful?
I have a Rails application that right now is pretty standard: Heroku/PostgreSQL backend, users go directly to my site to update data, there's no mobile app or anything. We're going to start licensing out the tech to other companies, so that different versions of the interface live on company1.mywebsite.com, company2.mywebsite.com, etc, where all of these interfaces share the same database.
I want some advice on how to go about building this. Do I create a separate Rails app for company1, company2, etc (with a lot of redundant code) and then set up each of them with API keys to query my master app, using its RESTful routes?
Any tutorials to point me to would be great as well.
I recommend you the book Service Oriented Design with Ruby and Rails, by Paul Dix. It has a lot of info about the kind of system that you want to build.
To answer your question:
Build an API server. It serves a JSON – for example – RESTful interface.
api.mydomain/client1/users.json
Build a frontend server. It consume the API service – using typhoeus for example – and serves the final pages. It uses a subdomain or domain name for identification of different clients.
client1.mydomain/users
We have a similar "platform".
What we did:
build a master API app (REST + Push)
build a core plugin for rails which has all the shared code
build a separate rails app for each client which has all the client specific code
We are using this setup for 3 years now and I'm pretty happy with it.