nano RAILS: development, testing and hosting tidbits - Home

closing comments

2008-12-17T05:34:00Z

The spammers won (well not really), after getting tired of deleting spam en masse (by the thousands every other months or so), I decided to close comments on some older posts that happen to have a better page rank than most. If you really need to get to me, please feel free to use the Contact me page

Even though I’ve been considering this for a while, this was in part prompted by Jesper of Just add water

His comment policy is simple:

In the future we will probably mark all of the above comment types as spam. Yes, some of the comments actually add value, but most of the comments actually are just made to improve ranking.
We will continue to manually approve the comments we mean will add value.
We will continue to hold comments for manual moderation. (so if your valid comment does not show up within a few hours, please contact us).

Actually, mine is even simpler.

- you must pass the Akismet test. - you must pass my own test: I review anything Akismet approves and will delete anything that looks, sounds or smells like spam. So even if your comment gets approved initially, I reserve the right to remove it. If that sounds arbitrary, so be it. Although I believe I have been quite fair in the past and will continue to be. Disagree? Send me your feedback

Unrelated note: Did you check out Twitter Essentials ?

merb 1.0

2008-11-08T06:11:00Z

merb has reached 1.0. What a tremendous achievement from all all contributors, and Ezra more specifically and Wycats

If you can’t wait, use gem install merb --source http://edge.merbivore.com

Should be available by tomorrow on your regular gem mirror

gem install merb

Cheers!

Index your DataMapper Models with Xapian

2008-09-24T06:48:00Z

Still pretty preliminary, but the basics seem to work. dm-xapian is a Merb plugin to index your DataMapper models with Xapian

At this point the details are still sketchy, and you first need to install xapian, then the xapian ruby bindings: Install Xapian and ruby bindings

Then it gets easier:

* build the gem with rake install * add the dependency dependencies "dm-xapian" * create the dm-xapian resource rake dm:autoupgrade * tell dm-xapian to index your models (Er, Resources) with something like:


  is_indexed :texts => [ :name, :region, :country, :varietal ],
     :values => [[:price, 0, "price", :float], [:ean, 1, "ean", :string]],
     :terms => [ [ :winery, 'W', "winery" ] ]

* build the index with rake xapian:rebuild_index models="Wine Winery" * build the index with rake xapian:update_index models="Wine Winery" This will remove from the index any model destroyed or update any model since the last call to xapian:rebuild_index or xapian:update_index * Run a query rake xapian:query query="edited 6" models="Wine Winery" verbose=true limit=25

Of course, running a query via rake is not so useful, but that’s all I tried so far. But at least this proved that the index was built correctly, and integrated search to an app is next.

As you may have noticed already, a big thing lacking at this point are specs.

This is in collaboration with Joshaven and based on the awesome work by Francis Irving on act_as_xapian who created the Rails+ActiveRecord version.

ANN: rails-undo-redo

2008-02-18T09:03:00Z

To this day, very few web apps provide any undo/redo capabilities. This is really not such a good thing for usability. There are a few exceptions like gmail, but it does not go far enough to provide what every one is used on their desktop.

Ever since I read Assaf’s post on the subject, and left hungry for more, as Assaf only helps you on the UI side and leaves you all the heavy lifting, I have been thinking that there must be a way to make it a lot easier to implement undo/redo in a consistent manner, and in a way that is as easy as rails has gotten us used to.

After a few failed attempts, and building on the work of Brian Durand and his Acts As Revisionable and ActsAsTrashable plugins, that I’ve reused (and probably abused as well), I have come to realize a few (obvious?) things, namely that:

for Undo/Redo to work, it needs to

Work across all models
Capture the list of changed objects (UndoRecords)
Group these UndoRecords per User Action (UndoActions)

Then undo and redo are just a simple matter of replaying the UndoRecords in the right order.

All my previous attempts, and most other plugins I got inspiration from focused on one model, and even though you need this as a building block, for any real application, you need to be able to undo changes across multiple models (even beyond belongs_to, has_many type changes).

When you look at the types of changes to a model in details, you really have 3 types of changes Create, Update and Destroy (these are the C-U-D in CRUD, even if you are not doing REST), and undoing each one requires special handling, so this is also tracked and managed by UndoRecord.

To make a long story short, I’ve packaged all these ideas into a new Rails plugin: Rails Undo Redo (and very soon a gem as well, because this can help, and that’s also easy, or very easy), you can now easily transform any Rails Application using Active Record into a full fledged multi level undo/redo application like most desktop application.

For a full how-to, read the Rails Undo Redo project page, or try the Rails Undo Redo demo.

git, submodules and Capistrano

2008-02-18T05:47:00Z

If you use git submodules, as git-rails does, and want to use Capistano, you’ll need to patch patch Capistrano (lib/capistano/recipes/deploy/scm/git.rb) to make sure your submodules get included.

        def checkout(revision, destination)
          git      = command

          branch   = head

          fail "No branch specified, use for example 'set :branch, \"origin/master\"' in your deploy.rb" unless branch

          if depth = configuration[:git_shallow_clone]
            execute  = "#{git} clone --depth #{depth} #{configuration[:repository]} #{destination} && " 
          else
            execute  = "#{git} clone #{configuration[:repository]} #{destination} && " 
          end

          execute += "cd #{destination} && #{git} checkout -b deploy #{branch}" 

          if submodules = configuration[:git_enable_submodules]
            execute += " && git-submodule init &&" 
            execute += "git-submodule update" 
          end

          execute
        end

then define this in your deploy.rb: set :git_enable_submodules,1

Or you can use the trunk version (post 2.1), which includes that support already.

Debugging Specs

2008-02-17T08:11:00Z

It is easy enough to debug specs on by one. For this you just run the ruby file that contains the spec with ruby-debug instead of ruby:

rdebug spec/rur_spec.rb

But when running via rake, you can’t do this. A simple solution is to add these lines in the spec file you want to debug (or in spec_helper.rb):

require_library_or_gem 'ruby-debug'
Debugger.start

And you are in business…

git branches, merges and remotes

2008-02-07T08:21:00Z

After releasing the first version of git-rails, Ron Damen created a clone of the repository and started improving on it. And I liked what he was doing, so now was the time to figure out how to get some of his changes back in to the master repo.

Here is the list of steps (and what they mean) to get his changes into the master branch on Gitorious.

First, define a remote branch to track his cloned repository git remote add ron git://gitorious.org/git-rails/rons-mainline-clone.git This adds this to .git/config:

[remote "ron"]
        url = git://gitorious.org/git-rails/rons-mainline-clone.git
        fetch = +refs/heads/*:refs/remotes/ron/*

Before doing the actual checkout, make sure you have nothing to commit in the current branch, then checkout a tracking branch: git checkout -b ron/master Now get the content from thre remote (remote “ron”, branch “master”) git pull ron master Once you’ve reached this point, it is easy to switch back and forth between branches

git checkout master
git checkout ron/master

Next, I created a temporary branch to merge what I like from Ron (not needed really)

git branch merge-ron
git status # does not switch branch!
git checkout merge-ron

This could be used as a shortcut: checkout -b merge-ron

Merge only specific changes (obtained using git log in ron/master branch)

git cherry-pick dc3de57a073e24eeb398e0cacbe52340258e861b
git cherry-pick 61579f92e1bfc95e582728011fcd21c79f08c3ae

Merge from merge-ron branch into local master

git checkout master
git merge merge-ron

And finally, push to origin git push origin

From now on, the only thing needed to get more changes from Ron is to pull changes into ron/master, cherry-pick changes and merge back into master. Sweet!

ANN: git-rails

2008-02-05T09:12:00Z

Git is quickly becoming one of the best option for using a DVCS (Distributed Version Control System). Git main goal is to be quick (most everything you do is local), and has already been battle tested by the Linux Kernel dev team.

Recently, I’ve started experimenting with git after Rick switched Mephisto to git.

Even though things are pretty straightforward, some things are easier than others, especially when you have to take it all in in one shot.

So, over the weekend, I created git-rails, completed with a rubyforge project, an installable gem (gem install git-rails), and a git repository hosted by Gitorious

Currently, git-rails provides 3 functions:

init repository (hookup to remote git repository, rails aware .gitignore)
install plugin managed by git (using git submodules)
update plugin

For now, I’m happy to use giston to manage svn hosted plugins, but I’m considering whether to add that functionality as well. We’ll see how things go.

To get started with git-rails, head over to the new git-rails project page.

Inspired by piston, and its newest sibling: giston/braid

Git to svn (read-only)

2008-01-31T08:54:00Z

As a follow up to last post about setting up git with gitorious

Here are the steps to mirror a git branch into svn.

First, I had to install git-svn

$ sudo port deactivate git-core
$ sudo port install git-core +svn

That did not got so well when trying to run git-svn:

error about Error.pm:
Can't locate Error.pm in @INC (@INC contains...

Something did not get copied correctly. Here’s the solution:

$ cp /opt/local/var/macports/software/git-core/1.5.2.4_1+doc/opt/local/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.8/Error.pm /opt/local/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.8/

Then create a place holder in svn so a location exist (it’s fine if it is empty): $ svn mkdir svn+ssh://svn.nanorails.com/home/psq/svn/plugins/plugins/rur -m "creating rur" Then add this to .git/config:

[svn-remote "nanorails"]
  url = svn+ssh://svn.nanorails.com/home/psq/svn/plugins/plugins/rur
  fetch = :refs/remotes/nanorails

nanorails will become the name of the branch Then fetch the svn (it won’t fetch anything, but this starts the process).

$ git svn fetch nanorails

$ git branch -a
* master
  nanorails

And the new branch is here :) Checkout that svn branch into a local branch:

$ git checkout -b local-svn nanorails
Switched to a new branch "local-svn" 

$ git branch -a
* local-svn
  master
  nanorails

Now the fun part.

Using rebase will forward the local commits to the updated upstream head

$ git-svn rebase
Current branch local-svn is up to date.

Get all the goodies from the master branch

$ git merge master
Merge made by recursive.
 .gitignore                            |    1 +
 MIT-LICENSE                           |   21 ++
 README                                |   48 +++++
 Rakefile                              |   20 ++
 init.rb                               |    3 +
 lib/undo_action.rb                    |   24 +++
 lib/undo_manager.rb                   |   89 ++++++++
 lib/undo_record.rb                    |  224 ++++++++++++++++++++
 lib/undoable.rb                       |   40 ++++
 lib/undoable_helper.rb                |   23 ++
 migrations/001_create_undo_records.rb |   32 +++
 spec/rur_spec.rb                      |  132 ++++++++++++
 spec/spec_helper.rb                   |   26 +++
 spec/undo_action_spec.rb              |   46 ++++
 spec/undo_manager_spec.rb             |   10 +
 spec/undo_record_spec.rb              |  368 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
 spec/undoable_spec.rb                 |   46 ++++
 17 files changed, 1153 insertions(+), 0 deletions(-)
 create mode 100644 .gitignore
 create mode 100644 MIT-LICENSE
 create mode 100644 README
 create mode 100644 Rakefile
 create mode 100644 init.rb
 create mode 100644 lib/undo_action.rb
 create mode 100644 lib/undo_manager.rb
 create mode 100644 lib/undo_record.rb
 create mode 100644 lib/undoable.rb
 create mode 100644 lib/undoable_helper.rb
 create mode 100644 migrations/001_create_undo_records.rb
 create mode 100644 spec/rur_spec.rb
 create mode 100644 spec/spec_helper.rb
 create mode 100644 spec/undo_action_spec.rb
 create mode 100644 spec/undo_manager_spec.rb
 create mode 100644 spec/undo_record_spec.rb
 create mode 100644 spec/undoable_spec.rb

And finally, send the changes to svn

$ git-svn dcommit
Committing to svn+ssh://svn.nanorails.com/home/psq/svn/plugins/plugins/rur ...
    A    .gitignore
    A    MIT-LICENSE
    A    README
    A    Rakefile
    A    init.rb
    A    lib/undo_action.rb
    A    lib/undo_manager.rb
    A    lib/undo_record.rb
    A    lib/undoable.rb
    A    lib/undoable_helper.rb
    A    migrations/001_create_undo_records.rb
    A    spec/rur_spec.rb
    A    spec/spec_helper.rb
    A    spec/undo_action_spec.rb
    A    spec/undo_manager_spec.rb
    A    spec/undo_record_spec.rb
    A    spec/undoable_spec.rb
Committed r66
    A    Rakefile
    A    .gitignore
    A    init.rb
    A    lib/undo_manager.rb
    A    lib/undo_action.rb
    A    lib/undo_record.rb
    A    lib/undoable_helper.rb
    A    lib/undoable.rb
    A    MIT-LICENSE
    A    spec/undo_record_spec.rb
    A    spec/rur_spec.rb
    A    spec/undoable_spec.rb
    A    spec/spec_helper.rb
    A    spec/undo_manager_spec.rb
    A    spec/undo_action_spec.rb
    A    migrations/001_create_undo_records.rb
    A    README
r66 = 98602d45907206a281f597f87445397f069cdc1d (nanorails)
No changes between current HEAD and refs/remotes/nanorails
Resetting to the latest refs/remotes/nanorails

And then there was much rejoicing across the land :)

Now, to update svn, the only things to do, assuming master is where the latest is, are:

$ git checkout local-svn
$ git merge master
$ git-svn dcommit

This setup could also bring changes back from svn, which git-svn is capable of doing, but I’ll be quite happy with the read-only part.

Resources:

Update: in fact, it looks like “git-svn dcommit” from the master branch, without merging to the “local-svn” branch first, also commits to svn.

Getting started with Git

2008-01-31T06:07:00Z

I’ve been using git for a bit now since Rick switched Mephisto to git, but I’ve only been using an existing repository, and not using the full thing just yet.

So as I’m starting a new project, I have been taking a few notes to get started with a new project (I’m also testing gitorious.org in the process, a free git repository provided by Johan Sørensen)

First, I created a .gitignore file to filter out anything unwanted. On a Mac, for example, it is alway a good idea to add: .DS_Store Then to create the initial repository and commit locally

$ cd vendor/plugin/rur
$ git init
Initialized empty Git repository in .git/
$ git add .
$ git commit

Now the big push:

$ git push git@gitorious.org:rur/mainline.git
The authenticity of host 'gitorious.org (67.207.146.32)' can't be established.
RSA key fingerprint is 1d:0f:80:3b:95:c5:a8:08:85:f6:fc:0a:b2:54:52:bb.
Are you sure you want to continue connecting (yes/no)? yes
Warning: Permanently added 'gitorious.org,67.207.146.32' (RSA) to the list of known hosts.
No refs in common and none specified; doing nothing.
fatal: The remote end hung up unexpectedly

Whoops! Not quite what I expected. Let’s try to pull first then?

$ git clone git@gitorious.org:rur/mainline.git
Initialized empty Git repository in /Users/psq/tmp/mainline/.git/
fatal: no matching remote head
fetch-pack from 'git@gitorious.org:rur/mainline.git' failed.

Hmm, not quite either. Looking at the gitorious “faq”http://gitorious.org/about/faq provides the answer :) Add the remote and master definitions to .git/config:

[core]
        repositoryformatversion = 0
        filemode = true
        bare = false
        logallrefupdates = true
[remote "origin"]
       url = git@gitorious.org:rur/mainline.git
       fetch = +refs/heads/*:refs/remotes/origin/*
[branch "master"]
       remote = origin
       merge = refs/heads/master

(Change to match your project). Then, try to push again:

$ git push origin master
updating 'refs/heads/master'
  from 0000000000000000000000000000000000000000
  to   74bbfc838d4984ee81d5560daee3511fe044d36e
Generating pack...
Done counting 22 objects.
Deltifying 22 objects...
 100% (22/22) done
Writing 22 objects...
 100% (22/22) done
Total 22 (delta 0), reused 0 (delta 0)
refs/heads/master: 0000000000000000000000000000000000000000 -> 74bbfc838d4984ee81d5560daee3511fe044d36e

Finally! And checking the gitorious site, the code has been pushed!

(You can get your push and pull urls from the mainline page.

To get started locally with an existing project, just use the pull url

git clone git://gitorious.org/rur/mainline.git

Now, if I can figure out the best way to get an svn mirror from gitorious, I’ll be in business!

Source (and a good tutorial): A tutorial introduction to git (for version 1.5.1 or newer)

A final note: the project referenced here is not quite fully baked, so use at your own risk…

MacHeist

2008-01-21T05:52:00Z

If you have a Mac, or want one, then you should surely take a look at the $49 bundle MacHeist has put together. An amazing value, with lots of cool apps. Plus 25% of your purchase goes to charities. It’s like getting 1password, CoverSutra (truly cool), and Snapz Pro for half the price, and getting all other 11 Mac Applications for free. Check it out (via Obie Fernandez)

Update: I had the link wrong (using https), and you could not see the apps. Fixed. Also forgot to mention you also get CSSEdit. And possibly VectorDesigner if they reach the $300,000 donation level.

Ruby-debug quick tips: init file and -n option

2008-01-12T08:28:00Z

I use ruby-debug quite a bit (too much? perhaps). And every time I start it, I find myself setting a few options (always the same ones), and it finally got to the point where I thought there had to be a better way. And there was! (Thank you, Kent)

The solution is even documented in some recent release notes:

Create a .rdebugrc in your home directory (it also looks for one in the current directory first):

set autolist
set autoeval
set autoreload
set forcestep

And voila! Each time you start rdebug, it executes this script.

An other good tip: run with -n to avoid stopping on the first instruction, now that you don’t need to run all these commands.

Update: with version 0.10, -n does not seem to be recognized, but —no-stop still works.

Ruby Gem 1.0 is out

2007-12-20T09:42:00Z

RubyGem 1.0 is out.

Yeah!

Which means that if you see

undefined method `require_gem' for main:Object (NoMethodError)

You’ll need to replace require_gem by just gem.

For example, unless you have the very latest version of ruby-debug (0.9.3), you’ll see the above error. In that case, though, updating your gem is simpler.

Upgrade to Windows XP?

2007-12-15T08:48:00Z

This was just too good to pass up! Vista has been getting a pretty bad rap anywhere you look (well, at least anywhere I look, and from second hand experience helping people with their Vista machine), so here’s your chance to finally Upgrade to XP

Ok, you can stop laughing now.

And for a real upgrade

(via Reginald)

Removing the quarantine attribute on your application

2007-12-12T06:33:00Z

With Apple latest OS, Leopard (Which I recommend highly), comes an interesting new feature (well, at least it is cute for a while, but it can get to you after a while). For annoying, try Vista

When you try to run an application you downloaded and get this message every time you try to start an application

"..." is an application which was downloaded from the internet...

There is an easy solution.

Check first tha it has the “com.apple.quarantine” Attribute.

xattr -l BetterZip.app which may give you something like: com.apple.quarantine: 0000;4726d129;Safari;5FF2A3CB-B74C-405A-BF92-AD14858A6F5A|com.apple.Safari

If it does, remove it using:

sudo xattr -d com.apple.quarantine BetterZip.app</sudo>