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Git Work Flow For Rails Developers

Friday, July 24th, 2009

Cross posted from darthsid

This is my very first blog post and so I though it should be about a tool that is indispensable for me – Git. I started using git about 10 months ago and looking back I can’t imagine how I managed to get work done without it. The purpose of this post however is not to sing git’s praises, there are lots of good articles on the web that do so much better than I ever could. Instead, I wish to share the work-flow I use on my projects. I developed this work-flow by trial and error over the months and is currently the most efficient and productive approach I can think of. If any experienced git users happen to stumble upon this post, please do provide suggestions/alternatives to help me improve my process.

The project I am currently working on requires me to maintain two parallel deployment branches. One is a “production branch” which is deployed on the live server and the other is a “development branch” which is deployed on a staging server. All enhancements and feature additions are done in the “development branch” and the only changes made in the “production branch” are production bug fixes that need urgent attention. Once the “development branch” is deemed stable it is merged into “production branch” and deployed.
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Posted in Git, rails, web development | Comments

Migration: Adding/Removing columns are now much easier

Wednesday, January 23rd, 2008

You may have noticed by now, that in Rails 2.0 changeset 7422, you can specify columns you want to add/remove in your migration by passing attribute:type pairs to the migration generator.

For example, lets assume that we need to add a column ‘role’ in users table(User model). In this case generate a migration like:

Output:

Here AddRoleToUser plays the main role. ‘Add’ specifies the we want to add column(s) and ‘User’ separated by ‘To’ specifies the table.

Similarly, if we need to remove a column ‘role’ :

Output:

Here RemoveRoleFromUser plays the main role. ‘Remove’ specifies the we want to remove column(s) and ‘User’ separated by ‘From’ specifies the table.

Isn’t it cool?

Posted in RubyonRails, Technology, migration, rails, ruby, web development | Comments

Ruby Script for SVN commit notification with log message, list of updated files and readable colored SVN Diff

Monday, January 14th, 2008

Some days ago I wrote a post about “SVN commit notification” which uses a perl script for sending commit notification with svn diff by mail. In this mail you can find svn diff from the last committed revision. I used to love this mail, soon I realized that it is a bit ugly and difficult to read. Also there were some important information missing. Like the name of user committing the code, the log message etc…

And then I started writing my own ruby script for same purpose but with some addition and modification. Commit notification script is that script, you can download and configure it with your SVN post commit hook as follows.

Add following line at the bottom of your post-commit file:

* Please remember to change the path of you commit-email ruby script.

Now open commit-email ruby file and modify the following section according to your requirement:

You are done with that, now onwards whenever someone commits the code, you’ll get the commit notification mail like:

Commit Email Preview

Posted in RubyonRails, Technology, Tools, notification, rails, ruby, subversion, web development | Comments

Single Table Inheritance validates_uniqueness_of Problem

Friday, October 26th, 2007

Consider a case of STI where:

Now try following at console:

This will let you create three records in users table with same name, validates_uniqueness_of written in User class has no effect on it. validates_uniqueness_of automatically scoped with class names, that means it will not let you create two managers with same name or two customers with same name or two users with same name.

If you want uniqueness of an attribute in overall table, put the following code in some file in your lib dir and require that file in environment:

And then use validates_overall_uniqueness_of instead of validates_uniqueness_of.

Posted in RubyonRails, Technology, rails, ruby, web development | Comments

Deploying rails application with pound as a Balancer

Thursday, September 13th, 2007

Now a days Apache + mod_proxy + mongrel_clusters, Lighttpd + Mongrel cluster and Nginx + mongrel cluster are well known for deploying rails applications.

You can also deploy your rails application with pound(a reverse proxy, load balancer and HTTPS front-end for Web server).

First you need to setup mongrel_clusters for your rails application by issuing ” mongrel_rails cluster::configure -e production -p 8000 -a 127.0.0.1 -N 3 -c ./ ” inside the rails application root directory(on client machine). This will create mongrel_cluster.yml in config directory. You can change parameters in this command, as -p 8000 specifies that mongrel instances will start up on port number starting 8000, -a 127.0.0.1 specifies that mongrel instances will listen to the localhost, -N specifies the number of mongrel instances and -c specifies the rails root directory.

Now you need to install pound(if not installed) by issuing following commands(as root):

  • cd /opt/src
  • wget http://www.apsis.ch/pound/Pound-2.3.2.tgz
  • tar xzpf Pound-2.1.6.tgz
  • cd Pound-2.1.6
  • ./configure
  • make
  • make install

This will install pound in /usr/local/sbin/pound. In order to proceed further we need to create pound.cfg(pound configuration file) in /etc/pound/pound.cfg . Below is the content of pound.cfg:

Start mongrel cluster by issuing mongrel_rails cluster::start in you app root directory, start pound by /usr/local/sbin/pound -f /etc/pound/pound.cfg , now you are done. Pound is listening the port 80 and redirect all requests to mongrel instances running on 8000, 8001, 8002.

* Please Note that we have configured pound at port 80, if port 80 is being used by apache or any other application pound will not start. You need to stop any service using port 80, if it is apache then stop apache, change line ‘Listen 80′ to “Listen 8080″ and start apache.

In a specific case, when apache is running at some port (let say 8080), you may want to use apache to serve static content of your application, in order to reduce some load from mongrels. In that case use the following:

This will redirect all requests for image, stylesheets, javascripts, flash to apache. Now we need to configure apache to serve those static content. Just add a virtualhost for that:

Its all done. All requests for dynamic content at port 80 will be redirect to mongrel running at 8000, 8001, 8001 and requests for static content will be served by apache running at port 8080.

Posted in RubyonRails, Technology, deployment, hosting, mongrel_cluster, pound, rails, web development | Comments

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