code-fu.pl

Running PDFKit on Heroku

2011-05-17T00:00:00+02:00

If you try to run PDFKit on Heroku you will run into a problem with starting a request to the stylesheets from within a request - thin can’t handle that.

Instead of running the PDFKit middleware, you’ll need to add a pdf format in your respond_to block.

First, register PDF as a mime-type in config/initializers/mime_types.rb:

Mime::Type.register "application/pdf", :pdf

Next, create the responder. The trick is to render the view you want to use to a string, create a PDFKit object from that, and add stylesheet paths instead of loading them through the problematic separate request.

format.pdf do
  kit = PDFKit.new(render_to_string(:template => "controller/view.html",
                                    :layout => "layout.html"))
  # stylesheets in tmp because I'm using compass
  kit.stylesheets << Rails.root.join('tmp', 'stylesheets', 'style.css').to_s
  render :text => kit.to_pdf
end

Next, you need to make sure that all partials are called as

render :partial => 'partial.html'

since render_to_string doesn’t know the proper format then.

GitHub repos in jekyll

2011-05-07T00:00:00+02:00

I created a plugin for jekyll to present a list of public Github repositories. Usage is simple: put the github_projects.rb file in the plugins/ directory, and the projects.html layout into _layouts/. Also, you need to add octokit to your Gemfile.

Edit the projects layout to specify which repositories you want to show, and customise the display. project is a hash (converted to Hashie::Rash) returned by Octokit.repo("user/repo", which gives a nice Ruby-styled wrapper for the Github API response.

As ususal, comments and suggestions welcome at the bottom of the page.

If you want to play with it, here’s the code:

Rails + MongoDB resources

2010-01-17T00:00:00+01:00

Here is a work-in-progress list of useful resources for starting out a Rails project with MongoDB and MongoMapper:

RailsTips articles about MongoMapper

Getting started

How to install MogoDB on OS X
MongoDB and MongoMapper Railscast
MongoDB with MongoMapper and Ruby on Rails with nice initializer example
Rails - Getting Started from mongoDB docs
MongoDB Data Modeling and Rails really good read on how to approach modeling of your data

MongoDB usage

Authentication

Devise
Devise MongoMapper Example at github

Useful additions

Acts as tree
ActsAsMongoRateable
ActsAsMongoTaggable
DelayedJob branch with non-AR backend support
CarrierWave - replacement for Paperclip (could use nginx-gridfs for serving the files)

Testing

Open source apps using Rails and MongoMapper

Newsmonger - “A simple social news application demonstrating MongoDB and Rails.”
Congo CMS
opusnow - a bugtracker

If you know any other useful articles, please point them out in the comments.