I was wondering what are the options for doing site analytics with a ruby on rails application ?
I haven't seen any solutions specifically targeted towards rails - more towards apache type web servers. I don't want to use the google analytics, I'd like to have the logging/analyis all local.
After a quick look at wiki's list of web analytics software http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_web_analytics_software, I can't see anything that I can see how to incorporate into my rails/ruby app.
AFAIK Rails deployments behind both Apache and nginx can both benefit from the host of tools developed for parsing web logs over the years. I loved AWStats :)
For application events not explicitly in the web logs - like logins, sign-ups, purchases - I'd recommend using keen-gem from Keen IO (Disclaimer - I work there). It's pretty easy - install or bundle the gem, then just add lines like this:
Keen.publish_async("sign_ups", { :username => "lloyd", :referred_by => "harry" })
anywhere in your Rails app to log events. Once the events have been logged you can use the workbench at keen.io to run queries and see visualizations, or you can use the REST API to pull any and all data back out for custom processing.
Most people deploy rails applications behind Apache or other web servers, because Rails applications can be set up to allow those web servers to quickly and efficiently serve static assets and cached pages. This also means that we can use the same log analysis tools we've always used like Analog, AWStats, etc.
Or we can just punt and use google analytics. I like row logs though :)
Hope that helps!
Related
I feel like my question is partially answered through a number of other questions, but I just can't piece everything together for my case.
Basically, I'd like to build a fairly simple web app, but also be able to fairly easily build a mobile app for it down the line. From my research, the best practice would be to build a RESTful JSON API, and then use that API both for my web app and for my mobile app.
I've already gone ahead and developed authentication for my JSON API (using : http://lucatironi.net/tutorial/2015/08/23/rails_api_authentication_warden/) and I've got it up on Heroku. Now for my web app, I'm using HTTParty to consume that API, and I'm getting the JSON back all fine and dandy. However, I'm not quite so sure what to do with the database. My first thought was that maybe I need to access the API's database via it's own API calls, but that seems incredibly complex (just the thought of having to make functions for User.find_by_<every attribute> makes me scared). The other thought would be to have my web app use the API app's database. However, I can't find any info on how to do that if the app is on Heroku.
So basically, I'm wondering what the best way to go about this would be. Surely there is a standard out there that every big or small web app with an API uses. I'm really surprised that something so prevalent these days is hard to find good answers for. Or am I going about this all wrong? Any pointers would be greatly appreciated.
Databases are add-ons in Heroku parlance.
Use heroku addons to get a list of the add-ons for your apps.
$ heroku addons -a appname
Add-on Plan Price
──────────────────────────────────────── ───────── ─────
heroku-postgresql (relaxing-purely-8366) hobby-dev free
└─ as DATABASE
First you may want to remove the database attached to your front-end app:
heroku addons:destroy fat-samurai-1234
Then find the name of the database add-on attached to your API app and attach the add-on to your frontend app.
heroku addons:attach shining-sushi-1234 -a sushi.
https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/managing-add-ons#creating-an-add-on
As to which approach is legitimate that's a matter of discussion. Many apps today use a single page architecture where the entire app is created on the front end - in javascript. So your app just consumes your REST api. Popular frameworks for this are Ember.js, Bootstrap and Angular.
The other approach would be to to create a classic server side app - while it's possible to create an app that would consume the REST api there is a significant overhead involved so it will be more performant to connect directly to the database.
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 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.
I am wondering how to integrate node.js on a rails app (for learning purpose).
Based on Michael Hartl tutorial (http://railstutorial.org/) I realized a basic twitter clone with rails and want to get user microposts in real-time without the use of comet or juggernaut. (the application is hosted on heroku)
For the moment, I only see example with node.js frameworks (http://howtonode.org/grasshopper-shoutbox) but nothing merged with a ruby on rails app.
I would be very thankful if someone knows a good tutorial or give me some points to start in order to accomplish this.
Thanks!
As Shripad said, I'd consider trying to build your app with Node by itself. Geddy will feel familiar (getting started anyway) if you have experience with Rails. Note: I do not have experience on a real world app with Geddy, but it is the best Rails-like framework I've seen so far. For persistence you can use SQLite, PostgreSQL or CouchDB, just like you would with Rails. I thought about how to communicate between a Rails app and Node without any intermediary. In our work project we're using Redis as an intermediary between Rails and Node. Rails publishes messages to Redis, Node pulls messages from Redis. I could not find a good way or example projects to avoid the middle communication layer on a personal project, so I went with the same setup. The good news is Node Redis modules are written and once you get everything installed, it is easy to test out pushing messages back and forth.
If you are looking at creating real-time apps then go with node.js (high concurrency) alone. You really cannot integrate node.js into a rails app. You can however have a node server setup on another port with an api and websockets configured and then have your rails app communicate with that server. It is PITA to do that kind of setup. You rather build the entire web app in node itself. However, if you want anything rails specific that does not use juggernaut then i would suggest http://www.pusherapp.com.
Its extremely easy to setup server push using Pusher.
It already did. Not really NodeJs but a framework built on top if it. Yada, yada, yada... check this out: https://github.com/1602/express-on-railway
**Run node along side your rails server**
If you want to intergrate your Rails app with Node you could use the node-rails gem
Node Rails will enable you to run a Node server along side your Rails application and have the two share authentication NodeRails assumes you are using Devise for your authentication. Node-Rails uses [redis gem][2] , so you will need to have that installed.
Learn more about using npm packages on Rails.
Since Rails is not multithreaded (yet), it seems like a threaded web framework would be a better choice for a Facebook application. (reason being is cuz each Rails process can only handle one request at a time, and facebook actions tend to be slow, because there is a lot of network communication between your app and facebook)
Has anyone used Merb to write a Facebook application? Is there a port of Facebooker (the Facebook plugin for Rails) to Merb?
We've used merb_facebooker in one of our projects (Rock the Vote), and it worked out pretty well. Testing Facebook apps is quite annoying, as you don't have control of the middleware, so watch out for your expectations of the FB API and make sure you validate as much of them as possible early in the development stages (not trying out all the things we needed to do with fbML early on brought a few headaches).
Behold, merb_facebooker.
In addition, if you want to use Facebooker directly (like for a desktop app,) just install the gem:
gem install facebooker
Have you looked at Starling? It's the server used by twitter to handle their messages. It's a persistent queue server that allows you to delegate jobs to workers.
You can run passenger on Apache which will start up as many Rails instances as it needs up to a certain limit (I think the default is 30). It will also kill them as required, so if you're not getting as many hits as you were 5 minutes ago, it will release the system resources back to the system.
Learn more about passenger at http://modrails.com