Below is the checklist of these practices:

1. Ensure that NS records and MX records are changed if they need to be changed

Changing nameservers will point the domain to the hosting server,  and changing MX records will redirect incoming mails to the mail server. As a very first step, we should make sure that name servers of the domain are set to be the correct one.  Changing MX record is a must if our application is parsing incoming mails or we wants to use other mail services for e-mail exchange, for example Gmail.

2. Ensure some backup mechanism in place for both data as well as user uploaded content like images/documents etc.

Since production data is very critical, we must setup backup  mechanism. It could be some type of scheduled task that takes periodic backup of all critical data, Or it could be some type of backup service provided by hosting company. When we talk about critical production data, it includes production DB, content generated by application users like images, documents, etc.

3. Ensure database indexes

We might have done development without having proper database indexes, but we should avoid going to production without them. Adding indexes might slow down insert queries a bit but it increases the  performance of read queries. It applies when application in production has percentage of read operations much more than write operations.

4. Enable your slow query log

This is specific to MySQL. Enabling slow query log allows MySQL to log slow running queries to a file. And this log can be used to find queries that take a long time to execute and are therefore candidates for optimization.

5. Ensure exception capturing is in place

We might want to be notified when something bad happens to our application. There are several hosted services available who receive and track exceptions, for example Hoptoadapp.com, GetExceptional.com etc…  Either we can choose one from these hosted services or we can use “exception notifier” plugin.

6. Ensure adding entries for cron/scheduled jobs

Most of the applications have some functionality/jobs that need to be run periodically, for example generating invoices, sending newsletters etc.  In most cases these jobs are done by a rake task. We should make sure that we have added such jobs to cron or similar program.

7.  Monitoring important processes

To ensure that our site is up 24×7 we need to ensure that all processes that our application needs are up. There can be many processes like MySQL, Mongrel, Apache etc.. These processes are very important as our application directly depends on them. For example if MySQL process get killed accidentally, our application would not be able to connect to MySQL and will start throwing exceptions.

We can choose any of the available monitoring tools like God, Monit, 24×7 etc…

8. Ensure confidential data filtering

We would never like to leak/share confidential information of our application users. We should make sure that none of the user’s confidential data like SSN, Credit card info, password are being written to log files. We might not have paid much attention on this while developing the application.

9. Rotate log files

Once our site is up and running, every single request write some text in log file. And hence size of the  log file keeps on increasing. Larger log files can put us in trouble if we get it beyond certain size. Its difficult to manage these log files, as larger files need more memory to open and need more time to download. In one of the rescue project we did , the log file size was 3GB.

We would recommend having logrotate setup for the application.

10. Setup Asset Host

Setting up asset hosts can reduce loading time by 50% or more. We must setup asset hosts for our application. Once asset hosts are all set, our static files will be delivered via asset hosts for example asset1.hostname.com, asset2.hostname.com

11. Clearing up stale sessions

We should make sure we should not left any stale session on the server. If our application is using DB or file system  as session store, we must add a schedule task to delete stale sessions.

These are some of the points we have identified from our past experience and we might be missing some. Feel free to  always add them as comments, and I’ll keep this post updated.

We also provide affordable rails deployment services.

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1. Post your requirements on twitter with hashtag #ruby #ror #rails
2. Go to Railsdevelopment.com - its a directory of rails companies. You can search for specific services with your budget ranges.
3. Working with Rails – Again a directory of rails developers and companies. You can browse through specific industry categories.
4. Local Ruby Meetups – The most passionate guys are always there in local meetups. For eg: we have delhi ruby meetups and you can find all local meetups in australia here
6. RubyJobs – Post a job on rubyjobs or rubyinside job board. There are some country specific ruby job boards.
7. RubyonRails wiki – There is a wiki of ruby on rails companies.
8. Open Source Contributions – Sites like http://agilewebdevelopment.com/ gives you a directory of rails plugins. Open Source contributions such as releasing a Rails plugin, or fixing bugs on projects , or Rails itself, demonstrates exposure to other Rails code bases and quality of a developer. Search for developer name in github.
9. Conferences – Conferences are good way to find quality rails developer or team.
10. Facebook – Few people post jobs on facebook.

Few tips :

• Don’t hire someone that doesn’t know Rails at all. Yes, we have seen some people doing it.
• Ask for references of previous clients if possible in your country.
• Look for someone who values the money you are paying them and will make your investment in them provide a valuable return.
• A personal Rails blog is a good indicator of  developer’s interests , experience and resume.

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“Yahoo! Search BOSS (Build your Own Search Service) is an initiative in Yahoo! Search to open up Yahoo!’s search infrastructure and enable third parties to build revolutionary search products leveraging their own data, content, technology, social graph, or other assets. This release includes Web, News, and Image Search as well as Spelling Suggestions.”

Some of the possible implementation of Yahoo! Boss may be finding related posts for your article, suggested tag/category for an article/query, correcting misspelled words by providing suggestions, fetching latest news on a topic dynamically, search over delicious tags, customized language search. Some of these have been tried and successfully implemented. An example is the TechCrunch’s Search Engine.

Here is a concise guide on how to use this new service in your next rails application.

Obtain API key

Get an application key from http://developer.yahoo.com/search/boss/.

Install BOSSMan Gem

BOSSMan is a gem for interaction with the Yahoo BOSS web service written by John Pignata. Install it using the following commands:

gem install gemcutter
gem tumble
gem install bossman

Usage

Put this in your environment.rb

require 'bossman'
include BOSSMan
BOSSMan.application_id = <Your Application ID>

Web Search

Use the following code to execute search over the web:

boss = Search.web("Apple Pie", { :count => 2, :filter => "-hate" })
puts "Number of results: #{boss.totalhits}"

boss.results.each do |result|
  puts "#{result.title}"
  puts "#{result.dispurl}"
  puts "#{result.abstract}"
end

# => Number of results: 2618888
# => <b>Apple</b> <b>pie</b> - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
# => <b>en.wikipedia.org</b>/wiki/<wbr><b>Apple</b>_<b>pie</b>
# => English <b>apple</b> <b>pie</b> recipes go back to the time of Chaucer. <b>...</b> The basis of Dutch <b>apple</b> <b>pie</b> is a crust on the bottom and around the edges. <b>...</b>

boss = Search.web("Moon", { :count => 10, :type => "nonhtml,-pdf" })

boss.results.each do |result|
  puts "#{result.title}"
  puts "#{result.dispurl}"
  puts "#{result.abstract}"
end

# => BACKGROUND:
# => www.<b>radford.edu</b>/~rusmart/<wbr><b>moon</b>.doc
# => We noticed was that one of the scan lines took longer to scan the <b>moon</b> then any other. This occurred toward the middle of the <b>moon</b>. <b>...</b>

boss = Search.web("Star", { :sites => "wwe.com", :style=>'raw' })
boss.results.each do |result|
  puts "#{result.title}"
  puts "#{result.dispurl}"
  puts "#{result.abstract}"
end

# => John Cena - WWE: Raw
# => www.<b>wwe.com</b>/super<b>star</b>s/raw/<wbr>johncena
# => Official profile from WWE for the professional wrestler John Cena, who has been training since he was 15. Features lots of photos and video clips, including John ...

Apart from universal arguments mentioned at the end of this document, the following arguments can also be used:

Click here to view list of response fields returned by web search.

Images Search

For searching images on web, use the following code:

boss = Search.images("snow hills", { :dimensions => "large" })

boss.results.each do |result|
  puts "#{result.url}: #{result.abstract}"
end

# => http://www.amanita-photolibrary.co.uk/photo_library/BI_habitats/gb96_chiltern_hills_from_ivinghoe_snow_std.jpg: Copyright © 2004 Chiltern hills east from near Ivinghoe snow habitats landscapes British Isles

Click here for list of additional arguments that can be provided with image search.

Click here to view list of response fields returned by image search.

News Search

Yahoo! BOSS also provides news search capabilties.

boss = BOSSMan::Search.news("free shipping", { :age => "1d-2w", :orderby => "date", :count => 1})

boss.results.each do |result|
  puts "#{result.title} [from #{result.source}]"
  puts "#{result.abstract}"
end
# => Wal-Mart announces weekly price cuts for holidays [from USA Today]
# => Wal-Mart said it will cut prices this holiday season for a week at a time on thousands of items, from bananas to board games. The first group of cuts hit Wednesday.

Click here for list of additional arguments that can be provided with news search.

Click here to view list of response fields returned by news search.

Spelling Search

Correct your misspelled words using its spelling suggestion feature:

boss = BOSSMan::Search.spelling("acknowlegment")
puts boss.suggestion # => acknowledgment

Site Explorer

You can also search for the pages from other sites linking into your site pages.

links = Search.se_inlink("http://mail.yahoo.com", :count => 2)
links.results.map { |result| p result.url }
# => http://www.aol.com/
# => http://groups.yahoo.com/

For displays a list of all pages belonging to a domain in the Yahoo! index, use se_pagedata method provided.

links = Search.se_pagedata("twitter.com", :count => 1)
links.results.map { |result| p "#{result.url} - #{result.abstract}" }
# => http://twitter.com/ - Use Twitter to send status updates (tweets) through your cell phone, instant messenger, or via the Web, and notify friends and followers of the little things <b>...</b>

Universal Arguments for Web, Images and News

Following is the list of most commonly used arguments with web, image and news search. For more comprehensive list click here

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While implementing caching in a recent rails project I came across some typical caching issues. In a lot of pages the content is same for all users but certain components in them have user specific actions. As an example, I have a page listing all public messages that users have posted(similar to the public timeline in twitter) but actions on those messages are user specific(eg: only owner or admin can delete a message). Also, most of these actions use ajax and the rails authenticity token in them also gets cached resulting in subsequent failures if the session changes. Another issue was that the timestamps in most pages is fuzzy and they become irrelevant if a page gets cached for too long. I could have created separate caches for each user but if the user base really grows managing the caches would become a nightmare and that would still not solve the authenticity token and the timestamp problem. The simplest solution was to use JavaScript, more specifically jQuery.

I have been a big fan of jQuery since I started using it about a year and a half ago and try to use it in all my projects. There is an excellent Rails plugin called jRails that replaces Prototype with jQuery and provides all the default Rails helpers for JavaScript making jQuery even more tempting to use. The examples I use below all use jQuery.

1. Handling User Specific Components

Taking the delete action as explained in the example above, the code in the cached view looks something like this:

<% if logged_in? %>
<li class="delete <%= 'only_' + (message.owner.login) + '_delete_allowed' %>">
  <%= link_to_remote "Delete",
    :url => user_message_path(current_user, message)
    :method => :delete,
    :confirm => "Are you sure you wish to delete this message?",
    :html => { :title => "Delete Post" } %>
</li>
<% end %>

This will create an li element with class “delete” and “only_kratos_delete_allowed” if the username of the message owner is “kratos”

In the non-cached part of the view I have the following code:

<% if logged_in? %>
  <% if current_user.is_admin? %>
    <%= javascript_tag "$(document).ready(function() { MessageView.removeInvalidDeteteButtons('only_#{current_user.login}_delete_allowed', 'true'); });" %>
  <% else %>
    <%= javascript_tag "$(document).ready(function() { MessageView.removeInvalidDeteteButtons('only_#{current_user.login}_delete_allowed'); });" %>
  <% end %>
<% end %>

If the current user is an admin I pass the JavaScript function an additional parameter.

In the application.js file I have the following code:

var MessageView = {
  removeInvalidDeteteButtons: function(element_class, admin) {
    if (admin == undefined)
    {
      $('.delete').each(function() { if (!$(this).hasClass(element_class)) { $(this).remove(); } });
    }
  }
}

If the second parameter is passed(in the case of an admin) the function does nothing, else it iterates over all li elements with class “delete” and removes all elements that do not also have, in this case, the “only_kratos_delete_allowed” class.

2. Handling Rails Authenticity Token

This part describes how to take care of the authenticity token problem:

I added the following code to the layout:

<%= javascript_tag "var AUTH_TOKEN = #{form_authenticity_token.inspect};" if protect_against_forgery? %>

This code creates a JavaScript variable named “AUTH_TOKEN” that contains the current authentication token. Since this section is not cached it always get the correct token.

Next I added the following code to application.js:

$(document).ajaxSend(function(event, request, settings) {
  if (settings.type == 'get' || settings.type == 'GET' || typeof(AUTH_TOKEN) == "undefined") return;
  var authTokenRegExp = /authenticity_token=\w{40}/
  settings.data = settings.data || "";
  if (authTokenRegExp.test(settings.data))
  {
    settings.data=settings.data.replace(authTokenRegExp, "authenticity_token=" + encodeURIComponent(AUTH_TOKEN));
  }
  else
  {
    settings.data += (settings.data ? "&" : "") + "authenticity_token=" + encodeURIComponent(AUTH_TOKEN);
  }
})

This code is a slight modification of the code posted here. ajaxSend is jQuery function that is executed before every ajax request is sent and I use it here to replace or append the authenticity token to the request, unless the request is GET or the AUTH_TOKEN variable is not defined.

3. Handling Fuzzy Timestamps

The code for timestamps in the cached view looks like this:

<span>
  <%= process_message_body_timestamp(message) %>
</span>

And the helper code is:

def process_message_body_timestamp(message)
  link_to "#{message.created_at}", show_message_url(message), :class => "timestamps"
end

I put the following code in the layout(non-cached):

<%= javascript_tag "$(document).ready(function() { CustomDate.datify(#{get_custom_date_arguments}) });" %>

The get_custom_date_arguments helper is defined in application helper and returns a string containing the current time arguments needed for the JavaScript function:

def get_custom_date_arguments
  current_time = Time.zone.now
  "#{current_time.year},#{current_time.month-1},#{current_time.day},#{current_time.hour},#{current_time.min},#{current_time.sec}"
end

I put the following code in application.js:

var CustomDate = {
  datify: function(current_utc_year,
                   current_utc_month,
                   current_utc_day,
                   current_utc_hour,
                   current_utc_minute,
                   current_utc_second) {
    $('.timestamps').each(function() {
      $(this).html(CustomDate.humane_date($(this).html(),
                                          current_utc_year,
                                          current_utc_month,
                                          current_utc_day,
                                          current_utc_hour,
                                          current_utc_minute,
                                          current_utc_second)).removeClass('timestamps')
    })
  },

  humane_date: function(date_str, current_utc_year, current_utc_month, current_utc_day, current_utc_hour, current_utc_minute, current_utc_second) {
    var time_formats = [
                        [60, 'less than a minute ago'],
                        [90, '1 minute'], // 60*1.5
                        [3600, 'minutes', 60], // 60*60, 60
                        [5400, '1 hour'], // 60*60*1.5
                        [86400, 'hours', 3600], // 60*60*24, 60*60
                        [129600, '1 day'], // 60*60*24*1.5
                        [604800, 'days', 86400], // 60*60*24*7, 60*60*24
                        [907200, '1 week'], // 60*60*24*7*1.5
                        [2628000, 'weeks', 604800], // 60*60*24*(365/12), 60*60*24*7
                        [3942000, '1 month'], // 60*60*24*(365/12)*1.5
                        [31536000, 'months', 2628000], // 60*60*24*365, 60*60*24*(365/12)
                        [47304000, '1 year'], // 60*60*24*365*1.5
                        [3153600000, 'years', 31536000], // 60*60*24*365*100, 60*60*24*365
                        [4730400000, '1 century'], // 60*60*24*365*100*1.5
                      ];

    var time = ('' + date_str).replace(/-/g,"/").replace(/[TUTC]/g," "),
        dt = new Date

    dt.setUTCFullYear(current_utc_year, current_utc_month, current_utc_day)
    dt.setUTCHours(current_utc_hour, current_utc_minute, current_utc_second)

    var seconds = ((dt - new Date(time) + (dt.getTimezoneOffset() * 60000)) / 1000),
        token = ' ago',
        prepend = '',
        i = 0,
        format;

    if (seconds < 0) {
      seconds = Math.abs(seconds);
      token = '';
      prepend = 'in ';
    }

    while (format = time_formats[i++]) {
      if (seconds < format[0]) {
        if (format.length == 2) {
          return (i>1?prepend:'') + format[1] + (i > 1 ? token : ''); // Conditional so we don't return Just Now Ago
        }
        else {
            return prepend + Math.round(seconds / format[2]) + ' ' + format[1] + (i > 1 ? token : '');
        }
      }
    }

    // overflow for centuries
    if(seconds > 4730400000) {
      return Math.round(seconds / 4730400000) + ' Centuries' + token;
    }

    return date_str;
  }
}

The datify function iterates over all timestamps(elements with class “timestamps”) and replaces them with fuzzy timestamps. The humane_date function(yanked from here) generates the actual fuzzy timestamps.

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Redbox is a library that pops a modal box over a web page, using CSS and javascript, so that you can ask the user a question, or show them something important. The box can be loaded from content already on the page (but hidden), or it can be loaded via AJAX. The contents of the box can be replaced using AJAX, for multi-page forms, and it can be closed easily using a javascript link.

Here is the process for integrating Redbox and tinymce.

Step I:
Install required plugins:

- TinyMce(http://github.com/kete/tiny_mce/tree/master)
- RedBox(http://www.craigambrose.com/projects/redbox)

Step II:
Include javascript files to layout:

  <%= include_tiny_mce_js %>
  <%= javascript_tag "initialize_editor();" %>

Now, add this javascript method which initilizes the text editor. You can specify the options you want for your text editor here.

Javascript:

function  initialize_editor(){
  tinyMCE.init({
    theme:"advanced",
    //mode:"textareas", // this is commented because we do not want to apply the editor to all the text area
     instances. Instead, we will use the class "mceEditor" to specify on which element we want to add the editor.
    theme_advanced_toolbar_location:"top",
    theme_advanced_toolbar_align:"left",
    theme_advanced_resizing:true,
    theme_advanced_resize_horizontal:false,
    paste_auto_cleanup_on_paste:true,
theme_advanced_blockformats:"p,address,pre,h1,h2,h3,h4,h5,h6",
    theme_advanced_buttons1:"bold, italic, underline, strikethrough, | , undo, redo, link, unlink, image, | , bullist, numlist",
    theme_advanced_buttons2:"",
    theme_advanced_buttons3:"",
    dialog_type:"modal"
  });
}

Step III:

Add editor class “mceEditor” to the text area where you want the editor to be added.

<%= f.text_area :details, :id => 'ta_id', :class => 'mceEditor' %>

Now, we need to create a tinymce editor control for the text area(’ta_id’) on loading the popup so add this “execCommand” loads the tinyMCE in the textarea.

<script type="text\javascript">
  tinyMCE.execCommand('mceAddControl', true, "ta_id");
</script>

Step IV:

When we submit our form and copy over the editor content to the text box it references. Tinymce provides a method ‘triggerSave’ that moves the contents from the editor to the form field. This method is automatically called by tinyMCE by adding a trigger on the forms submit method.

Save the content:

<%= f.submit 'Save', :class => 'primaryAction', :onclick => "tinyMCE.triggerSave(true,true);" %>

Step V:

Whenever we close our popup redbox we need to remove the tinymce editor control that we had added. Remove control on closing the redbox:

<%= link_to_close_redbox 'Close', {:onclick => "tinyMCE.execCommand('mceRemoveControl', true, 'ta_id'});"} %>

Works on: Firefox(1.5+), Safari and IE(7+)

For Internet Explorer we need to initialize the editor on loading the pop-up but for firefox we need to initalize editor on loading the main page. So we need modify our javascript

<script type="text\javascript">
  if(navigator.appName=="Microsoft Internet Explorer")
  	initialize_editor();
  tinyMCE.execCommand('mceAddControl', true, "ta_id");
</script>

And so here we are ready to go in just five simple steps.

Refer here for more details.

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Step 1 : Demystifying Authentication with Google AuthSub

Google provides an authentication service to those web applications that need to access services protected by a user’s Google account. I chose Google’s ‘AuthSub’ scheme for this. This also provides a high level of security to web application.
The AuthSub interface provides several methods for acquiring and managing authorization tokens. Once a web application has received a token, it can request access to a Google service.

To obtain an authentication token, submit an HTTP POST request to the following URL:

https://www.google.com/accounts/AuthSubRequest?next=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.example.com%2Fupload.html&scope=http%3A%2F%2Fgdata.youtube.com&session=0&secure=0

Setting session parameter to 1 indicates that the single-use token can be exchanged for a session token.
AuthSubSessionToken is a method that allows the web application to exchange a single-use token for a session token. I used a gem ‘gdata’ to convert the token into a session token.

client = GData::Client::DocList.new
client.authsub_token = params[:token]
session[:token] = client.auth_handler.upgrade()

Session token allows the application to make unlimited calls to the Google service. When using session tokens, your application should store the session token for each user rather than requesting a new one each time it needs to access a Google service. For other token management options, see Working With AuthSub.

Step 2 : Getting the Youtube Developer Key

A developer key is required that identifies the YouTube developer that is submitting an API request. A client ID identifies your application for logging and debugging purposes. Please visit here to obtain a developer key and client ID.

Step 3 : Improving the Youtube Model Plugin

“youtube-model” is a plugin  that provides youtube video uploading functionality. That was a good start.
I forked the plugin and updated it with few methods to get the rest of  the functionality done. Each method is explained here.
1. uploaded_by_user
A method uploaded_by was provided in the plugin to retrieve all the videos of the user but it receives username as a parameter. So I added a method uploaded_by_user that receives the session token and solves our purpose.

YouTube.uploaded_by_user(session[:token])

2. update_video
The video can be updated by using this method passing video id, session token and params hash as parameters.

YouTube.update_video(params[:id], session[:token], params[:you_tube_entry])

3. delete_video
The video can also be deleted if uploaded at the user’s youtube account by passing video id and token as a parameter.

YouTube.delete_video(params[:id], session[:token])

4. video_status
This method helps finding out the status of uploaded video.

s = YouTube.video_status(session[:token], params[:id])
@status = s.control.state.name

The changes to the plugin have been merged in the master and you can download everything here. I will really appreciate your feedback and suggestions to make this plugin better.

Vibha Chadha is working with Vinsol as a rails developer. When she is not writing code, she likes to read “geek” books and listen  to some “good” music.

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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.

I’ve divided my work-flow into two parts. The first part is a generic approach which I follow in all projects, the second part is specific to the case mentioned above and discusses how I manage the two branches using git. Although I mention “Rails” in the title of this post, the work-flow I define below is not “Rails” specific and can be applied to any project where multiple deployment branches need to be maintained. I assume the reader has a basic understanding of git and is comfortable with git branches. There are lots of configuration settings in git which help you setup things like you git author name, email and colors for git commands etc. There are two I would like to mention here though:

git config --global push.default "tracking"

This command tells git to perform a push only to the tracked remote branch in which you are currently working.

git config --global pack.threads "0"

This command tells git to auto-detect the number of threads to use for packing repositories and is useful when working on a machine with more than one core.

1. Generic Workflow

a. Start with a clean master branch.

git checkout master
git pull

You now have a clean master branch. Never work directly in the master branch, instead make all changes to a local branch.

b. Create a local branch.

git branch my_local_branch
git checkout my_local_branch

or do both in one command:

git checkout -b my_local_branch

This creates a new local branch named “my_local_branch” and switches to it. You can now perform all changes in this branch. One good practice to follow when using git is to commit often and in small chunks. This gives you finer control on the work done and allows you to fix mistakes without losing other work. Once you are satisfied, all those smaller commits can be consolidated in a single meaningful commit.

c. Merge with master branch.

git checkout master
git pull

if new changes were pulled do the following:

git checkout my_local_branch
git rebase master

A rebase will apply the newly pulled changes in the master branch to your local branch and then apply local branch changes on top of that. This will ensure a clean merge with master. Conflicts are very common during a rebase and will need to be resolved before you can have a successful rebase. You can also pass the “-i” option to rebase to perform an interactive rebase which will alllow you to squash multiple commits into one if you so require. Once you are finished with the rebase do the following:

git checkout master
git merge my_local_branch
git push

Once you are satisfied with the push you can delete the local branch:

git branch -d my_local_branch

2. Managing Multiple Deployment Branches

The master branch is set as the branch for production deployment and a new remote branch is created for development phase. Since I use capistrano for project deployment I set it up to have three separate tasks: “production”, “production_staging” and “development_staging”. The “production” and “production_staging” tasks use the master branch and the “development_staging” task uses the newly created remote branch. For both the remote branches you must follow the above work-flow i.e: never work directly in the branches themselves, instead create local branches to work in.

a. Create a new remote branch.

First create a new remote branch from our master branch:

git push origin master:refs/heads/development_phase_1

b. Track the remote branch.

Track the newly created remote branch:

git checkout --track -b development_phase_1 origin/development_phase_1

This will create a new local branch named “development_phase_1″ that is tracking the remote “development_phase_1″ branch. Everyone who needs to work on development branch tracks this remote “development_phase_1″ branch and pushes to it. The only pushes to master branch are production fixes.

c. Merge the development branch with the master branch.

Once work on development branch is finished we are ready to merge the two branches:

git checkout development_phase_1
git rebase master
git checkout master
git merge development_phase_1
git push
git branch -d development_phase_1
git push origin :heads/development_phase_1

Normally a rebase is not a good idea in a remotely tracked branch but since our phase is finished and we will create a new remote branch for the next phase, I do so here. Alternatively, I could do a force push for the remote development branch and everyone working on it would need to remove and retrack it again. The second last line removes our locally tracked development branch and the last one removes it from the remote repository.

Final Thoughts

As I mentioned before, the above presented work-flow is not perfect by any means but it works for me. I would appreciate feedback from anyone who reads this and has some suggestions/recommendations to help me manage my projects better.

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Working on client projects, we saw a pattern – the client owns a domain, which is either parked or has a blog running on it, and then they commission us to build an application. While the application is being developed, they want us to setup a landing page on the server, with a couple of links – to the blog etc. and want to capture email addresses of people who are interested in the service that the application would offer.

We actually found a few ready to use options for this. This php based paid script was one and there is also a  free launching soon module in PHP/Jquery.

However, we did not find anything for Rails so Satish set out to write a plugin for it. Then we thought it would be good to integrate it with Campaign Monitor , since most of our clients use this service for running their email campaigns.  And subsequently Satish extended it to add Mail Chimp integration also.

Give it a spin and send us your feedback via the LightHouse project.

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http://en.oreilly.com/rails2009/public/schedule/proceedings

• I really liked Arun Gupta’s post on Jruby on Rails and Sinatra.
  
• Also, discovered Rack middleware for request rewriting.
• Liked this starter for jruby on google app engine http://jruby-rack.appspot.com/
• Robert Dempsey tutorial on  rails basics was cool. You can find ppt and code samples  here : http://blog.adsdevshop.com/2009/05/05/a-z-intro-to-ruby-on-rails-goodies/
• There was a session on Sphinx and Thinking Sphinx by Christophe Lucas http://docs.google.com/Present?docid=dg5gdk9c_9gp77bvfj
• Another good session on internationalization of ruby on rails application by Chirtophe http://docs.google.com/Present?docid=dg5gdk9c_20fg3dnhxv
• There was a session on agile estimation but I couldn’t locate its stuff. http://twitpic.com/4l4q5/full
• Here are notes to SproutCore tutorial http://sproutcore-rails.s3.amazonaws.com/solution.txt
• There was a talk on chef – here is a github link of Chef Resources and Providers for deploying ruby web apps without capistrano

Please add any other userful links which I missed through comments. Looking forward for day 2. We are wearing black t -shirts with Vinsol printed in red.

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: more than doubled my money playing blackjack tonight. #railsconf

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