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
Continue ReadingRuby 1.9.1 (Entry 1)
I installed Ruby 1.9.1 from the Ruby site. I did the default “configure ; make ; make test ; make install” dance as root using gcc 4.1.2. This puts all the Ruby 1.9.1 files under /usr/local. The Ruby 1.8.6 version is a standard RPM for Fedora Core 8, and it’s all under /usr. I decided to switch between the two Ruby versions by constructing shell aliases to change the $PATH variable, as shown below. The syntax is the bash shell. [cwl@Fedorahost ~]$ alias old_ruby alias old_ruby=’export PATH=/usr/kerberos/bin:/usr/lib/ccache: \ /usr/bin:/usr/local/bin:/bin:/usr/bin:/usr/games:/home/cwl/bin’ [cwl@Fedorahost ~]$ old_ruby [cwl@Fedorahost ~]$ ruby -v ruby 1.8.6 (2008-08-11 patchlevel 287) [i386-linux] [cwl@Fedorahost ~]$ gem env RubyGems Environment: – RUBYGEMS… Read More
Continue ReadingThe Costs of Blogging
My wife got a glimpse of the blog yesterday. “So, how much to set up a blog for me?”, she asks. Good question. There a zillion ISPs out there, but I’ll go with what I know – the services offered by NearlyFreeSpeech.NET (NFSN). I have had my web site running with them since September 2004. They are a no-frills, metered-service ISP. Here’s the cost breakdown, and the steps to set up a blog: Register and fund a bandwidth account – registration is free. You can deposit as little as 25 cents to start a bandwidth account. My web site has been costing me $15 to $20 a year to run.… Read More
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