February 2nd, 2007
Update 2/11/07: Just to clarify, this plugin won’t keep your Rails site running on Dreamhost if the sum of all your running processes exceeds 200MB (which is when their process monitor kills your processes). Run ps aux and sum the VSZ column and then divide by 1024. If you’re pushing the limit and are only running one Rails site you may want to look at another provider. If you’re running multiple Rails sites, run each site under a different user (one account can create many users).
Per Thomas Aylott’s suggestion on my previous post Keeping Rails Running at Dreamhost Part 2 I’ve decided to release my Dreamhost signal handling code as a Rails plugin. I’m using it on a Rails 1.2.1 site and a Rails 1.1.6 site.
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Posted in Ruby, Ruby on Rails, Systems Administration | 13 Comments »
January 24th, 2007
Update 2/2/07: Per Thomas’ comment I’ve released the code below as the dreamhost rails plugin.
Update 1/25/07: People have reported difficulties copy and pasting the dispatch.fcgi source code from this blog post so here is a dispatch.fcgi to download. Make sure you make it executable!
My first attempt to keep my Ruby on Rails sites running at Dreamhost involved modifying dispatch.fcgi to implement the frao_handler approach as described on the wiki. This left me with a 3% 500 error rate. Ughh!
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Posted in Linux, Ruby, Ruby on Rails, Systems Administration, Web | 10 Comments »
January 24th, 2007
Update 1/25/07: Francois pointed out that now as of Piston 1.3.0 you can now do this all with the following command:
piston switch http://dev.rubyonrails.org/svn/rails/tags/rel_1-2-1 vendor/rails
For starters, if you’re still using svn:externals to manage your vendor/rails directory it’s time to switch to using Piston. svn:externals is so Q4!
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Posted in Ruby, Ruby on Rails, Source Control | 1 Comment »
January 22nd, 2007
The Java Posse hosted a great podcast interview with the authors of JRuby: Charles Nutter and Thomas Enebo. Additionally you get to hear what Tor Norbye is up to with his work on NetBeans Ruby integration and it looks like there’s some nice code assist features in the works! Really good code assist is the thing I miss most when doing Ruby (in RadRails) as opposed to Java (in IDEA).
It’s exciting to see the convergence of my two favorite languages coming along!
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Posted in Java, Ruby, Software Engineering | No Comments »
January 9th, 2007
Update 1/12/07: This solution has reduced my 500 error rate down to less than 0.2% but it’s still not perfect. I continue to plug away at this…
Update 1/24/07: I’ve finally solved my Dreamhost 500 error problems with a different solution described in Keeping Rails running at Dreamhost part 2
This weekend I moved two of my newer Ruby on Rails based sites (http://windandtides.com and http://gearandboats.com) over to Dreamhost. You simply can’t beat their prices for hosting a small site (if you prepay for 2 years and use coupon code GABRITO to save $50 the total is $140.80) and I’ve found their customer service to be pretty responsive too.
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Posted in Ruby, Ruby on Rails, Systems Administration, Web | 4 Comments »
December 18th, 2006
I had a piece of data import code in Wind and Tides that I just knew could be cleaner and more elegant. Last week I submitted it to Jamis and Michael who write the Rails Way blog and their refactoring of it exceeded my expectations and taught me a thing or two in the process. Their blog is definitely worth a read if you’re trying to take your rails coding to the next level!
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Posted in Ruby, Ruby on Rails, Software Engineering | 2 Comments »
December 6th, 2006
One thing I love about Ruby (and really miss when working in Java) is its interactive command line interpreter irb (or script/console if you’re using Rails). I really wish irb had tab completion and saved history configured by default out of the box. The good news is it’s easy to configure by creating a $HOME/.irbrc file with the following contents:
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Posted in Java, Ruby, Software Engineering | 3 Comments »
December 4th, 2006
I’ve been a Bloglines user for a long time. However, after hearing about Newshutch on the Web 2.0 show podcast Episode 26 I’ve made the switch and couldn’t be happier. It sports just the right amount of Ajax, good keyboard shortcuts, and it’s built with Ruby on Rails. In short it’s by far the best web based RSS reader out there, check it out!
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Posted in AJAX, Blogging, Ruby on Rails, Web | No Comments »
November 30th, 2006
I’ve been reading all the great things about Amazon EC2 (or Elastic Compute Cloud) and lots of pricing comparisons with VPS and dedicated hosting. I finally got an EC2 account and tinkered a bit and there’s a big difference between EC2 and Virtual Private Server or Dedicated hosting that most of the preliminary write-ups I’ve seen completely overlook.
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Posted in Database, FreeBSD, Linux, MySQL, Systems Administration | 6 Comments »
November 26th, 2006
With all of the hype around Ajax it’s easy to think you might need an MVC framework with baked in Ajax support like Rails ActionPack or JBoss Seam to make Ajax easy. However, libraries like Prototype (which is what Rails uses) make it so easy that it’s a snap to Ajax enable even the crustiest legacy web application!
Let’s take a look at what it takes to put a simple unordered list on a page with a refresh button to refresh the list without doing and page reload and then we’ll spruce it up a bit:
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Posted in AJAX, CSS, Javascript, Software Engineering, Web | 1 Comment »
