It’s highly unlikely that I’ll make it to RailsConf this year, due to continuing employment uncertainties. Too bad, since it’s close by in Las Vegas. Vegas is hurting, so I understand the room rates are still at $99 a night. I went to the first RailsConf 2006 in Chicago on my own dime, just to have the bragging rights. It was great fun, and all the presentations were good quality. I haven’t been able to attend since O’Reilly took over the event, but it looks pretty professional. Here’s a pic of me at RailsConf 2006. A couple of wise guys were working the event, and taking pictures of people who… Read More
Continue Readingauthlogic gem – and a step backwards
I was alerted to the authlogic gem yesterday, so I had to try it out. To my surprise, I discovered that the rails command was no longer working – WTF? I had also lost the rake tasks from my restful_authentication test case. Another mystery. Could the addition of the gems I installed couple of days ago have caused this problem? (See previous post.) Ultimately, I rebuilt my local gem repository with just the basic rails gems, and I got my rails and rake commands working again. Sheesh! That done, I installed the authlogic gem, and I set up a rails app for testing authlogic. Pretty cool – I’ll spend some… Read More
Continue ReadingTesting restful_authentication (Part 1)
The restful_authentication plugin is really nice, and it’s a critical part of any eCommerce site, so you have to test the hell out of it – unless you actually like irate customers. Anyway, unit tests won’t be enough, and Rick Olson (a.k.a. technoweenie) has already stated that he wants to use RSpec going forward, so that’s the first thing to set up. But, Cucumber is getting a lot of air play lately, so I decided to check that out too, as it may be a viable solution for integration testing. So – on to the set up. After viewing Ryan’s Railscasts 71, 155 and 156, I decided to install the… Read More
Continue ReadingConfiguring Passenger sub-URIs
Passenger sub-URIs allow you to run multiple Rails aplications under one Apache virtual host, which is great for development. Although Phusion has documented how to do this, I was having trouble. Eventually I got it to work, by doing the steps below: The Apache default DocumentRoot location is /var/www/html. I created a new directory and changed DocumentRoot to /var/www/public As root, cd /var/www/public. Add a link to each public directory of each Rails app to be accessed. On Linux, this looks like ln -s /somewhere/MyApp1/public MyApp1, where MyApp1 was created by running rails MyApp1 under the directory /somewhere Modify the Apache httpd.conf file. DocumentRoot was changed as shown in Step… Read More
Continue ReadingGoodbye Mongrel, Hello Passenger
Mongrel has been a great web server for Ruby and Rails, but with the significant changes in Ruby 1.9.1 (native threads for instance), I decided to switch to Phusion Passenger and Apache. If nothing else, this will keep me working with Apache (it is the A in LAMP, after all). The gem install passenger ran as we would expect, but passenger-install-apache2-module had a bunch of complaints. Mainly, I needed to install a number of development RPMs for Fedora Core 8 Apache. Also, passenger could not see the OpenSSL libraries. Sure enough, the mkfm.log file under ext/openssl in the Ruby 1,9.1 tree showed a number of errors that seemed to indicate… Read More
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