RobertBousquet.com

Sandboxing Rails v2

Mon, 05 Jul 2010 00:48:00 +0000

(This article is a work in progress. Still have a few things to test before I can fully recommend this version.)

It’s been a while since I’ve drastically changed the way that I manage my Rails stack. Going back to 2005, MacPorts seemed to be the way to go. Along the way, due to dependencies and the differing pace of each package there were times when my recipe didn’t work or needed to be updated with specific portfile hacks or versions. A lot has changed and in the last 5 years of Rails development and with Rails 3 right around the corner I figure it’s time to give this stack another approach.

One of the features of MacPorts is that it installs everything into /opt to isolate it from the Apple-provided development packages in /usr/bin. This is a double-edged sword that does provide isolation, but at the cost of straying from the Linux-established recommendation to put user-installed files into /usr/local/bin. This ends up requiring you to re-install many of the packages and libraries that Apple already provides and can cause some headache when the dependencies and packages don’t find what they’re looking for in your /usr or /usr/local areas.

A recent development in the Rails world is Homebrew, which helps you to manage these core development packages by automating the compilation process for each package from source. It adheres to the /usr/local namespace and at the same time, provides isolation of the packages through the clever use of symlinks to it’s own /usr/local/Cellar folder where the executables actually live. It does not provide any packages that Apple already provides (unless there’s some major flaw in Apple’s version) so that you don’t have to choose between Apple-provided Subversion or your own, for instance.

In any case, this is what I’m thinking will be my next stack recipe for Rails 3 (while at the same time supporting dozens of Rails 2 and a few Rails 1 apps from the past):

1. Install OSX Snow Leopard + X11 and XCode 2.3.2 (with optional iPhone 4SDK)
2. Install Homebrew (current method described on http://github.com/mxcl/homebrew)

$ ruby -e “$(curl -fsS http://gist.github.com/raw/323731/install_homebrew.rb)”

3. Install the brew-based packages we need:

$ brew install wget
$ brew install git
$ brew install mysql
$ brew install ghostscript
$ brew install imagemagick

4. Install rvm to handle multiple ruby versions

$ sudo gem install rvm
$ rvm-install

Then install each of the Ruby versions you need. Since I have so many apps in the past, I’m just going to install all of the recent versions. If you are just getting started and only want to run Rails 3, then just do the last 1.9.2 version.

$ rvm install 1.8.6 —default
$ rvm install 1.8.7
$ rvm install 1.9.1
$ rvm install 1.9.2

5. Inside of each Ruby version, you’re going to need to install all of your gems. It’s probably good to make a large list of them first, then run them in bulk.

$ rvm use 1.8.6
$ gem install rails

$ rvm use 1.9.2
$ gem install rails —pre

Clearing Floats

Wed, 19 May 2010 01:00:00 +0000

In the past, you may have used a <div style="clear:both"></div> to force a container to clear it’s floated contents. This has worked pretty well for a couple years, but yesterday I stumbled across a better solution: Simply remind the container div that it should be: overflow: auto in your stylesheet and it’ll do the right thing.

Password Protected Zip Files (OSX)

Sun, 16 May 2010 23:39:00 +0000

Password protected zip files cannot be opened within the OSX Finder, you’ll just get an “Operation Not Permitted” error but you can use the command line utility /usr/bin/unzip [filename]. It’ll prompt you for the password and then inflate the contents on success.

Disable ssh-agent in Snow Leopard

Fri, 15 Jan 2010 03:27:00 +0000

I use multiple ssh identities to connect to sites like github. This allows me to create accounts for a group of people that should all have commit access to a particular account, but that isn’t each person’s primary account. For instance, all of the developers at New Leaders have commit access to newleaders username so our clients can just give newleaders access to their repo and anyone on our team can then make changes if needed. Follow this guide to setup multiple github accounts and keys.

I ran into one problem on Snow Leopard which was that everytime I tried to authenticate to github using my non-primary account, it would send my primary ssh key first, and then authenticate me as bousquet instead of newleaders. Turns out there is integration in Snow Leopard between your keychain and ssh through a process named ssh-agent. Not sure what else it’s needed for, but I turned mine off to fix the problem I described above.

Disable ssh-agent by unloading it from launchd:

$ launchctl unload /System/Library/LaunchAgents/org.openbsd.ssh-agent.plist

Splitting large DMGs to fit on FAT32 Filesystem

Sat, 03 Oct 2009 02:30:00 +0000

I have a USB key where I store all of the installers and operating systems that I need to get setup on any machine. Since I have OSX, Windows and Linux operating systems stored there and I won’t always be using Mac hardware, I chose FAT32 despite its filesize limitations. To workaround the 4gb limit on individual files I use the following command to split the larger dmg images of OSX install disks:

$ hdiutil convert OSX.dmg -format UDRO -segmentSize 4000m -o OSX-split.dmg

Sandboxing Rails

Fri, 30 May 2008 16:13:00 +0000

James Duncan Davidson wrote up a great recipe for installing Rails that I have been pointing people to for a couple years. For some reason it’s now missing from his site so here’s my version of it from memory:

1. Install Apple Developer Tools, available on your OSX DVD or as a free download from http://developer.apple.com

2. Install the Macports package manager for OSX. It will manage the installation of all the libraries we need.

3. Hide the /opt directory from displaying in the OSX Finder gui

$ sudo echo opt >> /.hidden

4. Install MySQL server via MacPorts.

$ sudo port install mysql5 mysql5-server

Configure mysql5 to start automatically at boot by running the following two commands:

$ sudo launchctl load -w /Library/LaunchDaemons/org.macports.mysql5.plist
$ sudo -u mysql mysql_install_db5

5. Install Subversion.

$ sudo port install subversion +tools

6. Install Ruby and related libraries. Note: This is my recipe for the best Ruby 1.8.6 based Rails installation instead of the default Ruby 1.8.7. If you just want the latest version of Ruby, then just skip to 6b.

$ cd /Users/Shared
$ curl -O http://newleaders.com/attachments/0000/0910/dports.tar.gz
$ tar xzf dports.tar.gz

Edit /opt/local/etc/macports/sources.conf and insert the file:///... line before the default port repository line. The last two lines of the file should say:

file:///Users/Shared/dports
rsync://rsync.macports.org/release/ports/ [default]

Run:

$ portindex /Users/Shared/dports

7. Follow this series of commands to get Ruby and Rails installed.

$ sudo port install ruby186
$ sudo port install rb-rubygems
$ sudo port install rb-mysql
$ sudo port install rb-termios
$ sudo port install rb-sqlite3
$ sudo gem install rails

8. Optional installs I recommend

$ sudo port install -u git-core +svn +bash_completion
$ sudo port install imagemagick +wmf +gs +tiff
$ sudo gem install rmagick
$ sudo gem install deprec
$ sudo gem install mongrel_cluster

That should give you a firm foundation to start your Rails applications. This recipe has satisfied the needs of 90% of my applications.

Recommended Rails Plugins

Thu, 22 May 2008 16:24:00 +0000

I use these plugins in almost every project. Here’s the list:

restful_authentication
This is a basic restful authentication generator for rails, taken from acts as authenticated.

ssl_requirement
SSL requirement adds a declarative way of specifying that certain actions should only be allowed to run under SSL, and if they’re accessed without it, they should be redirected.

annotate_models
Add a comment summarizing the current schema to the top of each ActiveRecord model source file.

action_mailer_tls
Allows Rails to use GMail’s secure SMTP server to send emails from ActionMailer.

will_paginate
Easily paginate records, provides a great interface.

permalink_fu
This is a simple plugin extracted from Mephisto for creating permalinks from attributes.

file_column
Makes handling of file uploads really easy and has a nice integration with rmagick. I’ve been using this for a couple of years, it’s solid.

attachment_fu
attachment_fu is a plugin by Rick Olson (aka technoweenie) and is the successor to acts_as_attachment. To get a basic run-through of its capabilities, check out Mike Clark’s tutorial.

routing_tricks
This is a collection of hacks and tricks that may or may not actually be useful. It is intended more as a tool for exploring (and teaching) the internals of Rails’ routing implementation. Works great to specify subdomain or domain scopes for routes.

exception_notification
The Exception Notifier plugin provides a mailer object and a default set of templates for sending email notifications when errors occur in a Rails application.

active_merchant
Active Merchant is an extraction from the e-commerce system Shopify. Shopify’s requirements for a simple and unified API to access dozens of different payment gateways with very different internal APIs was the chief principle in designing the library.

Using Gmail SMTP with ActionMailer

Thu, 22 May 2008 15:45:00 +0000

I am big fan of Google Hosted Applications which provide free email accounts, calendars, and document storage for users of your custom domain. I run at least 20 different domains in this manner (robertbousquet.com, newleaders.com, paperflurrie.com, etc.) with the my favorite feature being the email hosting.

I also run about 30 rails applications across 10 servers or so and I often need to send email from my Rails applications for things like a friendly “Thank your for signing up” notice or Exception Notifications when something goes wrong. Rather than fiddle with Postfix or sendmail on each of my servers, I use Google’s SMTP servers (provided by the Google Hosted Applications account) to send mail. This allows me to skip the confusing Postfix installation/configuration steps, and provides a higher likelihood that my emails will not get caught in spam filters.

ActionMailer by default cannot securely connect to Google’s secure SMTP servers, so you have to use the following recipe to enable secure SMTP connections for your Rails application:

1) Download this plugin into your vendor/plugins directory:

action_mailer_tls

2) Create a file called config/initializers/smtp_gmail.rb and paste the following:

require "smtp_tls"
mailer_config = File.open("#{RAILS_ROOT}/config/mailer.yml")
mailer_options = YAML.load(mailer_config)
ActionMailer::Base.smtp_settings = mailer_options

3) Create a config/mailer.yml file with your Google Hosted Account credentials in it:

---
  :address: smtp.gmail.com
  :port: 587
  :user_name: john@doe.com 
  :password: s1j234gh
  :authentication: :plain

4) If you’re using the ExceptionNotification plugin, make sure the sender of the notifications matches your account email address or Google will not send it via SMTP

ExceptionNotifier.exception_recipients = %w(devteam@doe.com)
ExceptionNotifier.sender_address = %("John Doe" <john@doe.com>)

And that’s pretty much it. Make sure you enable POP/IMAP access in your Google Account so Rails can send mail via SMTP. It should be noted that the Google’s SMTP send limit is 500 emails per user per day.

Coming Soon

Mon, 10 Mar 2008 18:04:00 +0000

I will be moving my content here shortly.