Posts Tagged ‘Rails’

The importance of being up-to-date

Posted by Giovanni Intini | Filed under Business, Rails, Ruby on Rails, mikamai

Since I started working in the web development business the release of Rails 3 has been the first time I really felt I had to understand what was going on because otherwise I would be left behind.

There were simpler times where just reading the feeds of the most important blogs allowed me to be up-to-date, but either I’m getting old or the information has become too fractioned, because this time the only reason for me (and everyone in MIKAMAI) to get started with Rails 3 was to resume a practice that unfortunately we left behind in the past year: the internal presentations.

Starting last thursday, and hopefully never stopping, thursday afternoons aren’t about working for others, but are about everyone sharing his knoweledge with the others.

Last thursday was obviously all about Rails 3, so a couple of us connected their macs to the big screen and demoed new features of Rails 3.

It was nice, interesting questions were asked during the demos, and the overall mood was pretty good. I look forward to the next session.

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Read more | Comments (0) | Feb 19, 2010

Two improvements to your Capfiles

Posted by Giovanni Intini | Filed under Capistrano, Drupal, Ruby

I have lately started using a pattern that has become quite common among capistrano users: setting the server names and locations in a task. Doing this allows you to have multiple deployment environments, like development, staging, production, and so on.

desc "deploy to development environment"
task :development do
  set :deploy_to, "/var/apps/#{application}"
 
  role :web, "servername.mikamai.com", :primary => true
  role :app, "servername.mikamai.com", :primary => true
  role :db, "servername.mikamai.com", :primary => true
 
  set :user, "username"
  set :password, "secr3t"
  set :remote_mysqldump, "/usr/bin/mysqldump"
 
  set :db_user, "username"
  set :db_password, "secre7"
  set :db_name, "db_name"
end

This technique has proven itself to be really useful, especially when clients start to ask for deployments on their test servers, and you still want to be able to deploy to your development servers.

While refactoring my Capfiles I also took the time to rewrite the drupal:db namespace, adding the much needed tasks that allow you dump the remote databases and download them to your development box.

  namespace :db do    
    namespace :dump do
      desc "Deletes old database dumps, leaves only the latest on the server"
      task :cleanup, :roles => :db do
        dumps = capture("ls -xt #{shared_path}/dumps").split.reverse
        run "cd #{shared_path}/dumps; rm #{dumps[0..-2].join(" ")}"
      end
 
      desc "Dumps the local database"
      task :local, :roles => :db do
        raise RuntimeError.new("failed dump") unless system "#{local_mysqldump} -u #{local_db_user} --password=#{local_db_password} #{local_db_name} > dump.sql"
      end
 
      namespace :remote do
        desc "Dumps the remote database"
        task :default, :roles => :db do
          filename = "#{Time.now.to_i.to_s}.dump.sql"
          run "cd #{shared_path}/dumps; #{remote_mysqldump} -u #{db_user} --password=#{db_password} #{db_name} > #{filename}"
          run "cd #{shared_path}/dumps; bzip2 #{filename}"
        end          
 
        namespace :download do
          desc "Dumps and downloads the remote database"
          task :default do
            drupal::db::dump::remote::default
            latest
          end
 
          desc "Downloads the latest database dump"
          task :latest, :roles => :db do
            dumps = capture("ls -xt #{shared_path}/dumps").split.reverse
            get("#{shared_path}/dumps/#{dumps.last}", "./#{dumps.last}")
          end
 
        end
 
      end
 
    end

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Read more | Comments (1) | Oct 2, 2008

Legacy Path Handler, a Radiant Extension

Posted by Giovanni Intini | Filed under Radiant, Rails, Ruby, Ruby on Rails

We’re preparing to deploy the new Mikamai site (not up at the time of this post), that runs on the wonderful Rails-based RadiantCMS.

The VPS we’re deploying to runs on Phusion Passenger, and that means we can’t use mod_alias or mod_rewrite to 301-redirect the old URLs, already indexed by Google, to their new locations.

To solve this problem I wrote a little Radiant Extension, called LegacyPathHandler, that reads a simple list of URLs from a text file and does a 301 redirection on them before handling the control to Radiant’s default SiteController.

It works quite fine for us, but it has no specs/tests or documentation. Please feel free to contribute to the project if you feel you can improve it.

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Read more | Comments (0) | Sep 9, 2008