I currently have an RoR app in production across four application servers with independent logs per instance. What's the best way to aggregate the logging to a common location without resorting to syslog?
I wonder if there is a flavor of log4xxx for ruby.. Could be real cool. If there is, then perhaps you could centralize the streams from different instances into one place, it shouldn't be too complicated for simple implementation.., or perhaps use a tool like this.
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I know this is a topic which is very delicate however the simple question is.... has anyone uploaded a rails app using godaddy.com and if so how did they do it. I'm literally clueless. This is my first time. I cannot use anything else due to my clients choice.
If you're looking for shared hosting, Heroku is your best bet. Although you will need to make some minor modifications to your application to fit this environment, the benefits are considerable.
I would not recommend using regular shared hosting, which is primarily intended for PHP applications, for Rails. You need a VPS at the very least, and if you're not prepared to manage this, you need a managed environment like Heroku or you'll end up in serious trouble.
For small scale or hobby projects, a 512MB VPS is usually sufficient to get started.
If your client is insisting on GoDaddy, Rails may not be a good choice for you. It does seem possible according to the documentation but you need to have the correct account type.
I am writing an application where the webapp will be rails and it will allow a user to input rules/ruby-logic and save them to the database. Later on, Java will come along and grab these rules (if/else/elseif) and will execute them via jruby engine. I am wondering of the negatives and possible side-effects of this? And having two languages here?
I want to do rails front-end because the available plugins, and speed of development of webapps. For example, groovy doesnt have as many plugins and i believe that it's much slower in development.
Am I missing anything, or possible logic that may be hurtful in the future if I choose this solution?
In addition I think since ruby is dynamic it will be easier for the user to input rules via a 'ruby' syntax instead of another third-party library like bean shell.
I feel like most complex applications end up needing several languages eventually, usually interfacing through the DB as you're planning. I'm not sure what constraint leads to you Java on backend rather than ruby (guessing legacy or performance), but if that's a requirement then your plan sounds reasonable.
As far as negatives/side-effects, Jruby seems to lag a bit behind the latest ruby, but that's not generally a big deal as long as you match versions for the UI & backend. I can't think of anything that would be harmful in this off the top of my head, but the devil is always in the details ;-)
Is this possible using the proc file? I have an idea for an application that would use both Rails and Node+Socket.io and the ability to deploy both systems in one place would be amazing.
I would keep them separate myself, mainly down to the fact that it's two very different stacks that could easily diverge in the future.
Bear in mind that you're not charged per app on Heroku, and you can also share databases / other resources with no bother at all.
I want to let users write small custom apps (think themes or plugins on Wordpress) and upload/run them on my site.
I'm thinking about using Sinatra apps for this since it would give the users a lot of flexibility, and then running them as middleware inside my rails app.
But I can't figure out the security implications of this. I tried creating a simple sinatra app as middleware, and it has access to all the rails models and everything - so that is bad. Is there a way for rack to keep these separate so that the sinatra apps are effectively sandboxed and can't do any bad things (outside of an API or some specific way I setup for them to communicate)?
There may be an easier way to accomplish this that I haven't thought of too, so ideas welcome. Thanks!
Maybe a look at TryRuby / The Freaky Sandbox or one of the other Ruby sandboxes could take you somewhere.
How well do you know/trust your users? I hope the answer contains words such as "extremely" and "intimately". How easily could you reach them with something sharp and painful if they mess up?
I can't think of a simple way (heck, I can't think of a complicated one) to allow upload and installation of such things. Even with Wordpress, I don't think they allow any random plugin to be installed/run on the WP-hosted site - the risks of even well-meaning code causing problems just seem immense to my paranoid mind.
Sinatra would certainly give flexibility, but that may not be a Good Thing, as you've already identified.
Of course, if your users are Ruby/Sinatra literate (or able to become acceptably so) then you could give them a repository (git, svn or whatever) for their apps and deploy them into the appropriate place in Rack either ad hoc or on some schedule.
Thinking on the hoof, and without any notion of feasibility, if the functions that can safely be made available are relatively limited, you might consider looking at writing some sort of constrained DSL for them to utilise. If the scripts thus produced were short/efficient enough, perhaps they could be stored within the app's database and executed via eval?
What would you suggest as the best server stack for a dedicated server which needs to host Rails SaaS application (not a lot of traffic but need to keep options open for future).
Regardless of your application, you're probably going to want certain standard components:
nginx/passenger will work for small apps or large apps. You should use it.
Unless you have a specific reason to use something else, you should use MySQL since the vast majority of the Rails community uses it and you will be able to get better support.
You should have memcached running right away, even if you don't use it for much yet. You're going to want to be able to seamlessly add caching as it's needed.
You're going to want to have a process for setting up a new server that is fully automated. That way, if you need to spin up a second server, it's trivial. If you ssh into a box to configure it, this means that if you need another server in a pinch (or the first server gets corrupted), you're going to need to remember all the things you did. Not a good place to be in an emergency.
You should be on the very latest version of Ruby on Rails, and upgrade frequently. Keep an eye on deprecations and changes and make the suggested changes as early as possible. When Rails 3 is released, use it.
Engine Yard, where I work, uses an open source tool called chef to manage our automated deployment solution. That's probably a good option.
As ever with a question that broad, it depends. Some things to think about:
What does the application do?
Does the application use any database vendor-specific SQL?
What are the availability requirements?
What are the performance requirements?
How much data will there be?
Which server stacks do you or the person who will be administering it have experience of?
What is your budget?
One thing I can say with complete certainty is that you don't want to be using Windows because Rails work best on a Linux/UNIX stack.
A lot of it depends on your needs. If the model isn't very complex and/or your traffic is fairly low, you can probably get away with apache, mongrel, and sqlite on some *nix.
If you start seeing performance issues, you can add some memcached into the mix, upgrade (relatively painlessly) to mysql, and use a different server (passenger/nginx).
There are also alternate ruby implementations that have some performance boosting changes. Rubninous and jRuby come to mind.