• May 15, 2008

    Deploying with Capistrano via a gateway - some notes

    Some notes on setting up a gateway server for deploying via Capistrano that I couldn't find at the source.

    • You can specify the user you want to use to login to your gateway server like so: set :gateway, 'deploy@deploy.example.com'. This logs in to your gateway server as the "deploy" user.
    • You can specify an alternate SSH port for both your gateway and your deployment servers. E.g. setting ssh_options[:port] = 11111 will make Capistrano SSH to your gateway server with on port 11111. For your actual application (and web and database) servers, you can specify the SSH port like so: 
      set :gateway, 'deploy@deploy.example.com'
role :app, '192.168.1.113:22222'
role :web, '192.168.1.113:22222'
role :db,  '192.168.1.113:22222', :primary => true
    • If you're using public key authentication, you should put the public keys of your users (those who be deploying your app) on the gateway server and on the actual servers. I thought Capistrano would use the key of the "deploy" user but nope.
  • May 11, 2008

    Living on the edge (of Rails) #20 - script/dbconsole and flash.now now test-able

    This week’s report covers changes from 5th May 2008 to 11th May 2008 (the day the corresponding Rails Envy podcast was recorded).

    script/dbconsole

    A script/dbconsole script has been added that allows you to connect to your database using its console client.

    If you needed to connect to your production MySQL database (you better know what you are doing!), for example, you can run RAILS_ENV=production script/dbconsole or simply script/dbconsole production (thanks to Ryan Bates for pointing this out!) and it will login to your database server using the command line MySQL client. This also works with the PostgreSQL and SQLite databases.

    To use this script in your Rails app, remember to run rake rails:update:scripts after updating to edge Rails.

    This nice little enhancement courtesy of Steve Purcell, who originally had a similar database console plugin.

    Related changeset: http://github.com/rails/rails/commit/4a07103687084496b773e18a03b1f2f5e686f7ad

    flash.now is now accessible in tests

    This is something that many of us Rails developers have probably come across when writing tests for flash messages being set with flash.now, myself included. Basically, you couldn't test the contents of your flash.now because they were always being emptied before your test could get to them.

    # In your controller:
flash.now[:notice] = 'You gotta be kidding me!'

# In your test:
assert_equal 'You gotta be kidding me!', flash.now[:notice]
# FAILS because flash.now[:notice] is nil

    Andreas Neuhaus took a good look at how it works and figured out how to make testing flash.now work without resorting to assert_selects.

    Related changeset: http://github.com/rails/rails/commit/74eed6290e63111d1aad2b181692a84f4f040aea

    There isn't much else of note so far but if you'd like to know every gritty detail, you'd probably want to peruse the Rails commit logs. As always, let me know of any suggestions or how I can improve the Living on the Edge (of Rails) series.

  • May 4, 2008

    Living on the edge (of Rails) #19 - change_table for migrations and more

    This week’s report covers changes from 29 April 2008 to 4th May 2008 (the day the corresponding Rails Envy podcast was recorded).

    change_table for ActiveRecord migrations

    Thanks to Jeff Dean, who also blogged about the new change_table feature in ActiveRecord migrations, you can now change a table with a block like so:

    change_table :videos do |t|
  t.add_timestamps
  t.add_belongs_to :goat
  t.add_string :name, :email, :limit => 20
  t.remove_column :name, :email # takes multiple arguments
  t.rename :new_name
  t.string :new_string_column # executes against the renamed table name
end

    Some key things to note:

    • add_XXX would add a new column for you, e.g. add_string would add a new string field.
    • Of course, add_timestamps would add the magic created_at and updated_at datetime fields.
    • remove_column now takes multiple arguments.
    • rename would rename the table.

    Very nice, DRY enhancement, props to Jeff Dean once again.

    Related changeset: http://github.com/rails/rails/commit/96980bd561d79824b6cb6efbcbecdcbf8785d452

    ActiveRecord::Base.create takes a block like ActiveRecord::Base.new

    Yup now you can also create ActiveRecord objects with a block argument just like you could for ActiveRecord::Base.new:

    @person = Person.create(params[:person]) do |p|
  p.name = 'Konata Izumi'
  p.age = 17
end

    Credit goes to Adam Meehan for this patch.

    Related changeset: http://github.com/rails/rails/commit/dd120ede53eaf71dee76894998a81626b7a689fc

    Bugfix: change_column should be able to use :null => true on a field that
    formerly had false

    You can now use change_column in your migrations to alter a column as nullable if it was previously NOT NULL.

    This bugfix is courtesy of Nate Wiger.

    Related changeset: http://github.com/rails/rails/commit/10ef65a3b054270ed3d458ec8eb7c2b9a3e638f7

    As always, let me know of any suggestions or how I can improve the Living on the Edge (of Rails) series.

  • May 1, 2008

    Announcing Wego.com - our travel meta-search engine in beta (Ruby included)

    So we've been terribly busy at Bezurk these last 2 months or so working on our new re-branded site with a bunch of new features. We were lucky enough to secure a 4-letter domain name - wego.com (and it came at a price too!) so it was all worth it. Trust me, with a name like Bezurk you're going to be terribly hard to remember and to brand. We've had partners and friends who spell Bezurk in a variety of ways: berserk, bezerk, buzerk. Don't even ask us about our encounters with non-native English speakers. Don't.

    So yes, the new site: http://www.wego.com/.

    Wego.com logo


    We've decided to push it "live" as a beta product (and we know it is very much in beta, we're not kidding or trying to be Web 2.0-ish) prior to our launch party next week. Give it a few hits or so and let me know of any feedback (leaving a comment here is good), especially what annoys you. You might even want to use it to search for airline tickets or to book hotel rooms for your next trip and let us know if we managed to somehow epic fail at the task. If you liked it or booked a trip somewhere, we're glad to have helped you on your way.

    I'd write more about wego.com but what I really wanted to focus on, being a Rubyist and all, is what is really cool to me about wego.com - we've rebuilt our Hotels product from the ground up (it was a mostly Java before, and it is still live on http://bezurk.com/hotels/) in 85% Ruby, 8% JavaScript, 5% Erlang, and 2% Java. Well, those are rough figures anyway. We also made a strong effort to keep our mostly AJAX application as usable as possible without JavaScript but I'll admit, we had to cut some corners due to deadlines.

    I'd love to be more specific about the design and architecture of our Hotels application and on the cool stuff (CouchDB, Rack, Solr, jQuery, libmemcached, and of course, Ruby) we've used that have made our lives as developers much easier than when we were in Javaland - but I'd leave that for a later post. I'm sure my friend Arun Thampi also has a war story to tell so we'll come up with something entertaining. Stay tuned!

  • May 1, 2008

    Living on the Edge (of Rails) in French

    It looks like Cyril Mougel has translated my 2 latest posts to French: LotE #17 and #18. Thanks Cyril!

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