John Plummer . com

Heroku, Precompiling Assets and Enviroment Variables

John — Fri, 30 Mar 2012 14:34:12 +0000

It’s easy enough to set up a staging environment on Heroku and have the environment use your staging.rb at runtime by setting the RACK_ENV variable to “staging”. Currently there is a problem if you need anything from your staging.rb whilst the slug is being compiled. I ran into this when I specified an asset host. [...]

Creating a staging environment on Heroku

John — Tue, 21 Feb 2012 16:40:28 +0000

If you’re hosting your app on Heroku (possibly even if you aren’t) it is a good idea to create a staging environment also. Heroku has docs on this but the short version for a new app is: heroku create staging-app-name --stack cedar --remote staging(if the app is already on Heroku, just add the remote: git [...]

Heroku error with conditional rb-fsevent gem

John — Thu, 16 Feb 2012 16:22:53 +0000

Using the guard gem to run tests etc in your Rails app normally requires some form of file system monitoring. The monitoring will be OS dependant and rb-fsevent is the gem for OSX. This can be added to the Gemfile conditionally with: gem 'rb-fsevent', :require => false if RUBY_PLATFORM =~ /darwin/i Unfortunately when you next [...]

Use multiple accounts with Heroku

John — Tue, 14 Feb 2012 16:16:30 +0000

https://github.com/ddollar/heroku-accounts is a plugin for Heroku to allow you to use multiple accounts, e.g. work and personal. To install: heroku plugins:install git://github.com/ddollar/heroku-accounts.git Then set up each account: heroku accounts:add personal --auto heroku accounts:add work --auto Set your default: heroku accounts:default personal Then to switch account for an app: heroku accounts:set work

Optional Parameters in View Partials

John — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 12:37:20 +0000

It’s generally good practise to pass variables to view partials using locals rather than littering your code with @variables. This allows better reuse of the partial. To make the locals optional, provide default values if they are nil or undefined. I have seen many recommendations to do this with a test for defined? According to [...]

Rails 3.1 on Heroku, TLDR Version

John — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 15:44:28 +0000

Create the app If not installed, install PostgreSQL rails new app_name -T -d=postgresql cd app_name/ rvm --create --rvmrc 1.9.2@app_name rvm rvmrc trust Edit .Gemfile bundle install createuser -P -S -R -d app_name (no to ‘Superuser’ and ‘Create roles’, yes to ‘Create databases’) rake db:create Create procfile in app root. foreman start and check http://0.0.0.0:5000/ Push [...]

Does Email Obfuscation Work?

John — Wed, 07 Dec 2011 21:01:10 +0000

It seems to be common wisdom that if you put your email address on the web in plain text you will get spammed (more). There are various ways to try and hide an email address from various crawlers whist still displaying it to visitors, most involving javascript and relying on the crawlers not having [...]

Installing Postgresql and pgAdmin

John — Tue, 06 Dec 2011 13:10:39 +0000

The default database for Heroku is PostgreSQL and, while you could use SQLite for development and Postgres for production, there are some inconsistencies between the two. Ideally you would use the same version of the database server but currently Heroku uses version 9 for dedicated databases and 8.3 for shared databases and seem to [...]

Setting up Rails on a Clean Install of Mac OS X Lion

John — Tue, 25 Oct 2011 10:03:33 +0000

I realise that OSX does not have a registry to clog up but I have just reinstalled Lion on my Macbook Air; probably a hang up from Windows. This is a checklist for installing Homebrew >> Rails. Install XCode 4.1 (There are issues with the 4.2 compiler and certain rubies and gems) Install Homebrew https://github.com/mxcl/homebrew/wiki/installation [...]

Changing Three Finger Swipe to Back in Lion

John — Tue, 18 Oct 2011 11:43:54 +0000

Lion introduces some new gestures which unfortunately breaks some gestures I am used to such as a three finger swipe to move back in Chrome. Easily fixed by opening System Preferences > Trackpad > More Gestures and changing swipe between full screen apps to use four fingers and swipe between pages to use three.