ninajansen.dk » tips

Do not use apt-get to install passenger on Ubuntu

Nina Jansen — Sat, 14 Feb 2009 02:28:43 +0000

So I wanted to experiment with Phusion Passenger on my home server. The server runs Ubuntu 8.10 and serves a bunch of small low-traffic sites through apache (including this blog). I saw that there was a package from brightbox for passenger on ubuntu and tried to install it. However, this package automatically disables the php5 apache module. I have no idea why, it is possible to run both php and passenger apps from the same apache. Anyway this clobbered all my wordpress blogs (I know, I should always read the messages carefully…) and I had to reinstall php5. If you want to install passenger on Ubuntu 8.10, use this approach.

Cache sweepers in Rails, put them in app/models!

Nina Jansen — Wed, 14 May 2008 15:41:50 +0000

So i’ve been spending hours tracking this one down: I wanted to have cache sweepers in rails and followed the advice from railscasts and railsevny. Those tutorials tell you to put sweepers in an app/sweepers directory and add that directory to your load path. DON’T DO THAT. That simply did not work for me (using rails 2.02). After banging my head against google for hours, I found out that sweeper simply has to go in app/models, MVC be dammed. If they are put there they get loaded, and you can add them as active record observers. If they are not put there rails won’t find them. I don’t know if this is a bug or a feature, but that is just the way it is.

In place editing in rails

Nina Jansen — Tue, 13 May 2008 17:06:01 +0000

So basically, the official plugin is old and cant really deal with restful routing. For some reason, when I used the url_for method in my views, the in place editor javascript function couldn’t interpret the (restful) route properly and sent a post request to ‘/controller/1/edit’ to an action named “1″ with an id set to “edit”, which obviously didn’t do anything useful. So instead I called the in place editor script in the following manner (I’m using haml btw.):

%span{:id => "name", :class => "in_place_editor_field"}= @user.name = in_place_editor "name", {:url => '/user/edit/' + @user.id.to_s, :rows => 1, :size => 32 }

So basically I hard coded the route so it would fall back on standard routing. Yes I know that:

This is ugly as sin
I’m supposed to do a PUT request to a function named update, not a post request to a function named edit.

But it solved the problem.

Rails tips #1

Nina Jansen — Fri, 02 May 2008 11:02:42 +0000

These might be completely obvious to everyone, but I found them useful:

If you want to migrate a specific database, you can do it by setting RAILS_ENV on the command line. Like this:
rake db:migrate RAILS_ENV=production
If you want to see all the rake tasks in your application with a description of what they do, execute:
rake -D