My name is Joel

rvm, ree, nginx and phusion passenger

Friday, March 12th, 2010

A production web / application server that I maintain has been around for mostly wordpress and static sites we host for some of our clients. Soon, however, the need for some Rails-based client sites will be popping up for us over there. Traditionally the set-up for those apps have been in clients’ own hosting environments, or were apps I hosted in a dedicated app-server slice of my own. So, the need crept up, and now I’m left planning for now, and the future. And what is that future, you might ask (ok, probably not)? Rails 3, of course.

The baseline reference implementation for Rails 3, as I know it, is 1.8.7, but has been tested to work with Ruby 1.9, and also functions properly with Phusion’s Ruby Enterprise Edition (henceforth known as REE). To say that Ruby is in a transition phase is an understatement. The community has been hard at work trying to get gems, frameworks, their associated plugins, etc, to work with all of the new shiny ruby-based toys. In order to accurately test, the RVM project has stepped up as the solution for testing and developing across multiple Ruby interpreters.

New server setup, quickly moving innovation, growth and change … all of these point me in one direction – drinking the RVM kool-aid and getting right into it. But not without a few hiccups. Here are my steps in getting things rolling with rvm, nginx, ree and passenger.

Note: Don’t install nginx at first thinking that passenger will end up being installed as a plugin, or module. I wasted some time in doing that. When you go through the process of installing passenger it’ll ask to compile and re-install nginx. So we’ll get to that eventually.

To get everything compiling as I wanted I had to install a handful of obvious, and not-so-obvious, packages and libraries. To wit:

sudo apt-get install ruby-full build-essential curl libpcre3 libpcre3-dev libpcrecpp0 libssl-dev zlib1g-dev libgcrypt11 libgcrypt11-dev bison libreadline5-dev

Your mileage may vary.

Also, the irony doesn’t escape me that we needed to install ruby, “ruby-full”, in order to install a bunch of other rubies. But hey, whatever.

Install rvm. It’s as easy as following the instructions at the RVM site. I chose to go the gem route. Follow the instructions as are given and things will be fine. The only hiccups I had involved some libraries that are taken care of in the above package installs.

Install the versions of ruby you’d like. rvm install 1.8.6,1.8.7-head,ree,1.9.1

According to fellow boston.rb’ist @techiferous we use 1.8.7-head, because

# Rails 3 needs Ruby 1.8.7. Use rvm to manage Ruby versions. Do “rvm ruby-1.8.7-head” NOT ruby-1.8.7-p249 (broken gems).

After some time compiling and wrangling everything together you should have a handful of different rubies at your disposal. Please visit the rvm site for examples, use cases and general information. It’s worth your time.

At this point I switched to ruby-ree in preparation of the passenger and nginx install. rvm ree. A quick ruby –version now tells us that we’re running ruby 1.8.7 (2009-12-24 patchlevel 248) [x86_64-linux], MBARI 0×6770, Ruby Enterprise Edition 2010.01.

Install Passenger and Nginx. gem install passenger && rvmsudo passenger-install-nginx-module will get you started. Here’s where the install of Nginx goes down, as noted in the text after you run the command:

Nginx doesn’t support loadable modules such as some other web servers do,
so in order to install Nginx with Passenger support, it must be recompiled.

I chose to customize my own install and selected the second option. Do whatever you’re most comfortable with. I prefer to have my compiled source in /opt/local, but again, it’s all a matter of preference. After some more compiling, we were all done and have a newly compiled install of Nginx, with Passenger, Utilizing the REE ruby interpreter.

Last but not least, go thank Wayne Seguin for the work on RVM. Amazing work!

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From the Ruby Noob Dept: Issue(s) with accepts_nested_attributes_for

Saturday, February 27th, 2010

Finally took some time to jump in and refactor some nested forms at Thredded using Rails 2.3’s accepts_nested_attributes_for. Thanks to Ryan Bates’ screencasts on the topic it was fairly easy. A little code cleanup and everything worked as it should … other than one thing.

Can’t mass-assign these protected attributes

Noticed that error in my development logfiles after a particular form wasn’t being saved. A User class had some protected, and some not, attributes and until I added the Profile attributes to it, the nested form submitting a User and it’s associated Profile record would not save.

class User < ActiveRecord::Base
  has_one  :profile
  accepts_nested_attributes_for :profile
  attr_accessible :login, :email, :password, :password_confirmation
  # ...
end

Needed just the Profile attributes set as accessible and ready for mass assignment

class User < ActiveRecord::Base
  has_one  :profile
  accepts_nested_attributes_for :profile
  attr_accessible :login, :email, :password, :password_confirmation, :profile_attributes
  # ...
end

Another case where you need to know at all times where and if properties of your classes are locked down or not.

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Sassy-pants

Thursday, February 25th, 2010

I’m pretty set in my ways professionally these days, so it’s hard sometimes to make a shift from what I’m comfortable with to a methodology that’s contrary to something that still works.

Like CSS – what the what needs to change in my work-flow regarding CSS at this point? I’m more than comfortable with box-models, browser hacks, sprites, peek-a-boo and double-float margin bugs. Waking up one day and thinking – “I could be better” was the kick in the pants to try something new. Enter Sass.

Sass is a meta-language on top of CSS that’s used to describe the style of a document cleanly and structurally, with more power than flat CSS allows. Sass both provides a simpler, more elegant syntax for CSS and implements various features that are useful for creating manageable stylesheets.

I won’t go into the syntactic sugar that makes Sass so much fun – John Long [1] [2] and Adam Darowski have already done excellent jobs rounding up the high, and lower, level concepts and tricks. I highly recommend visiting and bookmarking those links for future reference.

A few things I’ve bumped into, however, that bear mentioning here involve a few tools and code snippets that I went looking for as I went down that sassy path. The first being a Textmate bundle for sass I found to help out during rapid and uninterrupted development. The syntax highlights are, of course, fantastic, but the killer feature is easily the quick CSS generation keyboard shortcut. Command-R will parse and generate your CSS file right there from inside Textmate. If there are any issues a tool-tip will pop up with the error. If you switch over and reload your browser too fast to see the tool-tip you’ll see an unstyled page – a big honking notice that you were doin’ it wrong.

The few bits of code, of many, that I needed to find, or create, quickly before getting down to business – Eric Meyer’s reset stylesheet, and maybe a mixin or two that I’m quick to use in a pinch – like .clearfix.

// Reset

html, body, div, span, applet, object, iframe,
h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, p, blockquote, pre,
a, abbr, acronym, address, big, cite, code,
del, dfn, em, font, img, ins, kbd, q, s, samp,
small, strike, strong, sub, sup, tt, var,
b, u, i, center,
dl, dt, dd, ol, ul, li,
fieldset, form, label, legend,
table, caption, tbody, tfoot, thead, tr, th, td
  :margin 0
  :padding 0
  :border 0
  :outline 0
  :font-size 100%
  :vertical-align baseline
  :background transparent

body
  :line-height 1

ol, ul
  :list-style none

blockquote, q
  :quotes none

// remember to define focus styles!
\:focus 
  :outline 0

ins
  :text-decoration none 
// remember to highlight inserts somehow!

del
  :text-decoration line-through

table
  :border-collapse collapse
  :border-spacing 0

// ----------- Clearfix --------------- 

.clearfix
  *display:                 inline-block
  &:after
    content:                " "
    display:                block
    height:                 0
    clear:                  both
    visibility:             hidden
 
// ----------- Clearfix as mixin --------------- 

=clearfix
  *display:                 inline-block
  &:after
    content:                " "
    display:                block
    height:                 0
    clear:                  both
    visibility:             hidden

Those are two solid examples of how easy it is to just jump right in. So give it a shot – `sudo gem install haml` to install what you need, and get to work playing.

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