I am going to be away from the internet for a few weeks and would still like to get a project done. What steps should I take to make sure I have access to the things I need (ruby and ROR) while I will be disconnected?
when offline, the following are hard to get:
gems
docs
rails expert blogs
stackoverflow ;-)
so,
gem install as much as you can
download all the railscasts
keep one or two rails book around
and find a place with internet wifi
and most importantly:
un-plug yourself 2 days before the real offline, that's called staging ;-)
If you use version control, make sure you can work offline. DVCS do this well, I've heard SVN can work offline if you have a local SVN server.
Running the Rails app on localhost will allow you to access it with your browser locally.
Apart from this it would also be nice to have documentation offline too. Download everything you can think of: Rails, Ruby, Shell, libs etc. Or use books.
Make sure you have local copies of any documentation you need (railsapi.com lets you download the Rails docs)
Make sure you have all the gems/plugins you need
This may not affect you, but it's bitten me before.
If you are using a javascript library such as jQuery, and are linking to Google's Hosted Libraries rather than a local one, you may find jQuery stops working when you are offline.
Download and link to a local copy before you go.
Get your app (in its current state) up and running on your laptop. Then shut off wireless and make sure it still goes. Don't just guess at what gems and things you'll need - make sure you see it actually run. Don't forget things like database engines and queuing servers. Then start guessing about other gems and items you might need.
Make sure that
gem server
will start up a webserver and let you browse the docs for all your installed gems.
Download every Ruby gem. All of them!
You never know when you'll need to extract EXIF data, or something.
Related
I have been working on this, very, small photo cms lately. And now i ready for setting it up to Github. So i will love to have some kind of installer, just as much for leaning it, I'm thinking something like you type a command and then it starts by copy all the files to the rails app, and then asking you for what your flickr_id is etc..
So i have to store all this information and call it down.. i.e if i should show some pictures, i have to use the flickr_id.
Hope you understood my question..
You can start by using rails-app-installer, it's not maintain completly but can works. It's use on the Typo project
I've been spending the last few months on developing a (my first) Rails application all by my self, just me and my Linux box, all in my development RAILS_ENV, no SCM ("for shame!") or anything. It has become quite the beast now and I am getting ready to release it onto the world. My question is: how am I ever going to make this work?
I installed gems, plugins, servers (MySQL, node.js, nginx, sphinx, juggernaut), photo compression apps that I call, video compression tools (FFMPEG) etc, I also obviously have a DB and a (lot of) seed data. I can't even remember all the things I did to my system to make it all work, but it does.
So now, when I deploy this on some stranger's server, how do I make sure that all those things get installed and configured correctly? How is e.g. FFMPEG ever going to get installed on this server when I deploy my application. How will the seed data get uploaded, how will the servers get started, with the right parameters etc.
I have read (a little bit) about Capistrano which seems to be the deployment tool of choice in the Rails community, but I am not sure if that will cover all my needs. For example, how do I figure out all the gems I used or the plugins (do I even need to know?). Is there any way I can test the deployment on my own linux box,the same I am developing on, i.e. pretend that I am hosting my own production server/rails_env and "deploy" it there?
Any help will be much appreciated.
Cheers.
There a lot of standards to follow that make life easier...
As far as figuring out which gems you need, you could try and use RVM and make a local config that you keep adding gems to until your app works. This will be kind of like starting from scratch so that you are sure to know precisely what configuration you need to run. (And it should make it easy to stand up a new, identical environment each time.)
The RVM route will allow you to test in a specific environment, which should help.
You can list the required gems in your environment.rb file so that the server demands them on start-up.
Good Luck, Cowboy .
Since I am developing a "secure" OAuth protocol for my RoR3 apps, I need to send protected information over the internet, so I need to use HTTPS connections (SSL/TSL). I read How to Cure Net::HTTP’s Risky Default HTTPS Behavior aticle that mentions the 'always_verify_ssl_certificates' gem, but, since I want to be more "pure" (it means: I do not want to install other gems, but I try to do everything with Ruby on Rails) as possible, I want to do that work without installing new gems.
I read about 'open_uri' (it is also mentioned in the linked article: "open_uri is a common exception - it gets things right!") that is from the Ruby OOPL and I think it can do the same work.
So, for my needs, is 'open_uri' the best choice (although it is more complicated of 'always_verify_ssl_certificates' gem)? If so, can someone help me using that (with an example, if possible) because I have not found good guides about?
You should find the best tool for the job and use it. You should not try to limit your usage of libraries to just Rails and the Ruby standard library, because these two alone will not always provide you with everything you need. As you have indicated, you found the right tool for the job - don't reject it just because it's not part of "official" Ruby or Rails.
You can easily manage which gems your application needs with Bundler, such that everyone on the team is, with a single command, always able to install and run the application, including automatically installing all gem dependencies. Rails 3, by default, integrates with Bundler and expects that you will use Bundler to manage all your gem dependencies.
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 am currently using Aptana RadRails for Ruby on Rails development on my local system.
Now I want to work on a Rails-Application that is hosted on my dedicated server, but unfortunatly RadRails does not provide support for Remote File Access (apart from SVN).
Is there an IDE for Rails-Applications that gives me the ability to work on an application on my remote server transparently?
Is this what you're looking for?
You're doing it wrong!
Seriously, you should be using source control and you should be releasing your software with a deployment tool like vlad or capistrano.
You run your app locally, commit changes, then run deploys to your server. Once things are setup you shouldn't need to even log in to your server.
Developing the way you're doing is going to cause many headaches and reduce your productivity. Now the snide rails developer comment, if you really cared about productivity you wouldn't be using windows in the first place...
It's not available yet, but Haven will allow you to edit files via FTP/SFTP in your browser. It will also allow you to plug into your source control if that's where your stuff is. It should be a nice alternative to the current fat client options.
Disclaimer: I'm a co-founder of Wikid Labs.