Nokogiri Timeout::Error when scraping own site - ruby-on-rails

Question

Nokogiri works fine for me in the console, but if I put it anywhere... Model, View, or Controller, it times out.
I'd like to use it 1 of 2 ways...
Controller
def show
#design = Design.find(params[:id])
doc = Nokogiri::HTML(open(design_url(#design)))
images = doc.css('.well img') ? doc.css('.well img').map{ |i| i['src'] } : []
end
or...
Model
def first_image
doc = Nokogiri::HTML(open("http://localhost:3000/blog/#{self.id}"))
image = doc.css('.well img')[0] ? doc.css('.well img')[0]['src'] : nil
self.update_attribute(:photo_url, image)
end
Both result in a timeout, though they work perfectly in the console.

Answer 1

When you run your Nokogiri code from the console, you're referencing your development server at localhost:3000. Thus, there are two instances running: one making the call (your console) and one answering the call (your server)
When you run it from within your app, you are referencing the app itself, which is causing an infinite loop since there is no available resource to respond to your call (that resource is the one making the call!). So you would need to be running multiple instances with something like Unicorn (or simply another localhost instance at a different port), and you would need at least one of those instances to be free to answer the Nokogiri request.
If you plan to run this in production, just know that this setup will require an available resource to answer the Nokogiri request, so you're essentially tying up 2 instances with each call. So if you have 4 instances and all 4 happen to make the call at the same time, your whole application is screwed. You'll probably experience pretty severe degradation with only 1 or 2 calls at a time as well...

Answer 2

Im not sure what default value of timeout.
But you can specify some timeout value like below.
require 'net/http'
http = Net::HTTP.new('localhost')
http.open_timeout = 100
http.read_timeout = 100
Nokogiri.parse(http.get("/blog/#{self.id}").body)
Finally you can find what is the problem as you can control timeout value.

Answer 3

So, with tyler's advice I dug into what I was doing a bit more. Because of the disconnect that ckeditor has with the images, due to carrierwave and S3, I can't get any info direct from the uploader (at least it seems that way to me).
Instead, I'm sticking with nokogiri, and it's working wonderfully. I realized what I was actually doing with the open() command, and it was completely unnecessary. Nokogiri parses HTML. I can give it HTML in for form of #design.content! Duh, on my part.
So, this is how I'm scraping my own site, to get the images associated with a blog entry:
designs_controller.rb
def create
params[:design][:photo_url] = Nokogiri::HTML(params[:design][:content]).css('img').map{ |i| i['src']}[0]
#design = Design.new(params[:design])
if #design.save
flash[:success] = "Design created"
redirect_to designs_url
else
render 'designs/new'
end
end
def show
#design = Design.find(params[:id])
#categories = #design.categories
#tags = #categories.map {|c| c.name}
#related = Design.joins(:categories).where('categories.name' => #tags).reject {|d| d.id == #design.id}.uniq
set_meta_tags og: {
title: #design.name,
type: 'article',
url: design_url(#design),
image: Nokogiri::HTML(#design.content).css('img').map{ |i| i['src']},
article: {
published_time: #design.published_at.to_datetime,
modified_time: #design.updated_at.to_datetime,
author: 'Alphabetic Design',
section: 'Designs',
tag: #tags
}
}
end
The Update action has the same code for Nokogiri as the Create action.
Seems kind of obvious now that I'm looking at it, lol. I dwelled on this for longer than I'd like to admit...