Wylie » Ruby on Rails

RVM, Rake and Cron on Ubuntu

admin — Wed, 24 Aug 2011 20:43:58 +0000

Tennnngh! I read countless blog posts, tried numerous approaches that I found and rebuilt the server more than a couple times. And finally I found what the missing piece was for getting a rake command to run in cron with rvm.

Most of the results I found (on stackoverflow) flagged the solution as adding the path to your rvm in your line item in crontab. Something like /home/username/.rvm/gems/rake my_awesome_task… etc. I tried every variation of that I could think of and got the same results.

I dont use cron every day so this was a revelation to me. I found out that you can set variables, environment variables in your crontab file.

So the solution was very simple. Edit the crontab like this.

crontab -e

Then at the top of the file (mine is the first line)

SHELL = /home/wylie/.rvm/bin/rvm-shell

Then my commands:

* 4 * * * /bin/bash -l -c ‘cd /path/to/app && RAILS_ENV=production rake mytask –silent’

Done.

Hope that saves someone some time.

PayPal Recurring Payments with ActiveMerchant

admin — Tue, 22 Feb 2011 08:38:31 +0000

I found several pieces to the puzzle but it took me a while to put it all together. After I got it working I thought I should write it down in case I needed to remember what I did or maybe someone else would find it useful.

The first thing you should know is that ActiveMerchant does not support recurring payments with PayPal. But Raymond Law generously made a fork that fixes this. I couldnt get the fix as a gem so I just installed it as a plug in. https://github.com/rayvinly/active_merchant/

Then I went to the Railscasts on PayPal with ActiveMerchant. http://railscasts.com/episodes/146-paypal-express-checkout

In my config/environments I made a slight change from the Railscasts example:

config.after_initialize do
ActiveMerchant::Billing::Base.mode = :test
paypal_options = {
:login => "mysandboxlogingoeshere",
:password => "MYSANDBOXAPIPASSWORD",
:signature => "SANDBOXAPI"
}
::STANDARD_GATEWAY = ActiveMerchant::Billing::PaypalGateway.new(paypal_options)
::EXPRESS_GATEWAY = ActiveMerchant::Billing::PaypalExpressGateway.new(paypal_options)
::EXPRESS_RECURRING_GATEWAY = ActiveMerchant::Billing::PaypalExpressRecurringGateway.new(paypal_options)
end

I made a registration controller:
rails g controller index new checkout complete

def checkout
response = EXPRESS_RECURRING_GATEWAY.setup_agreement(:description => description, return_url => registration_complete_url, :cancel_return_url => registration_new_url)
redirect_to EXPRESS_RECURRING_GATEWAY.redirect_url_for(response.token)
end
def complete
token = params[:token]
response = EXPRESS_RECURRING_GATEWAY.create_profile(token, :description => description, :start_date => start_date, :frequency => frequency_in_months, :amount => amount_in_dollars, :auto_bill_outstanding => true)
if response. success?
#handle success
else
#handle failure
end
end

You can figure out your own way to handle the values and details of the transaction. The Date format can be set with

start_date = Time.now

The amount can be just a number. Dont put it in quotes.

paginating multiple collections with will_paginate

admin — Wed, 13 Oct 2010 17:01:22 +0000

Use case: I have a page with multiple post. Each post has multiple comments. I want to use the infinite_scroll jquery plugin to “paginate” through the comments and post.

Admittedly, nested pagination makes little sense until you think about it in context of having multiple infinite scrolls on a page.

Here are the bare bones.

My Post model:
def comment_pages(comment_page = 1) self.comments.paginate( :page => comment_page, :per_page => 5 ) end

My View (haml version):
#comment_pagination= will_paginate(comments, :param_name => "comment_page_#{post.id}")

Now i have unique list that infinite scroll can use to paginate through.

jQuery Emoticon Selector Plugin

admin — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 23:15:34 +0000

I couldn’t find an emoticon plugin for inserting an emoticon into a text area. I found plenty that converted the emoticon code into an image. So, I set out to write my first jQuery plugin.

If you choose to use this, keep in mind this was my first plugin and should be thoroughly tested before using it. And if you make it better I would very much like to see what changes you made.

Lets check it out.

The view has two components. The jQuery call and the div with the necessary elements. (my examples are how i used this in Ruby)

<% javascript_tag do %>
$(document).ready(function() {
$("div#emodiv").emoticate({icon: ’smiley-icon’, replacediv: ‘list’});
});
<% end %>

Then the div that you identified in the jQuery call.

What is going to happen is that the select and options will be changed to a UL list with the icon images. When an emoticon is clicked it will be inserted into the text area within the div. (The id for the textarea does need to be unique).

And here is the plugin.

(function($){
$.fn.emoticate = function(options){
var defaults = ({
replacediv: ‘replaceme’,
image_path: ‘/images/emoticons/’,
speed: 500,
icon: ’smiley’
});
var options = $.extend(defaults, options);
return this.each(function() {
var select = $(’select’, this);
var area = $(‘textarea’, this);
var icon = $("#" + defaults.icon, this);
var emo =
‘
$(‘option’, select).each(function () {
var option = $(this);
var emocode = option.val();
var title = option.text();
var link = $.fn.emoticate.emoticlick(title, emocode, defaults.image_path);
emo += ‘
’

+ link

+ ‘

’;

}); //end option

emo += ‘

’;

select.remove(); //get rid of the select to make way for emotification

$("#" + defaults.replacediv, this).html(emo); //put the emotification HTML in the right div

$("#" + defaults.replacediv, this).hide(); //hide the emoticons

var listdiv = $("#" + defaults.replacediv, this); //reset the var so it will work in the icon click.. this probably could be done better

//bind the link for every a tag that is in the replaced div

$(‘a’, this).bind(‘click’, function() {

$.fn.emoticate.insertme(area.attr(‘id’), $(this).attr(‘id’));

return false;

}); //end bind

//click the icon

$(icon, this).bind(‘click’, function (){

listdiv.show(defaults.speed);

});

//function to click anywhere to hide the emoticons

$(document.body)click(function (){

listdiv.hide(defaults.speed);

});

}); //end select

}; //end function

$.fn.emoticate.emoticlick = function(id,emocode, image_path){

return ‘‘"> + image_path + id + ‘">’;

};

$.fn.emoticate.insertme = function(areaId,text){

var txtarea = document.getElementById(areaId);

var scrollPos = txtarea.scrollTop;

var strPos = 0;

var br = ((txtarea.selectionStart || txtarea.selectionStart == ‘0′) ?

"ff" : (document.selection ? "ie" : false ) );

if (br == "ie") {

txtarea.focus(); var range = document.selection.createRange(); range.moveStart (‘character’, -txtarea.value.length);

strPos = range.text.length;

}

else if (br == "ff") strPos = txtarea.selectionStart;

var front = (txtarea.value).substring(0,strPos);

var back = (txtarea.value).substring(strPos,txtarea.value.length);

txtarea.value=front+text+back;

strPos = strPos + text.length;

if (br == "ie") {

txtarea.focus();

var range = document.selection.createRange();

range.moveStart (‘character’, -txtarea.value.length);

range.moveStart (‘character’, strPos);

range.moveEnd (‘character’, 0);

range.select();

}

else if (br == "ff") {

txtarea.selectionStart = strPos;

txtarea.selectionEnd = strPos;

txtarea.focus();

}

txtarea.scrollTop = scrollPos;

};

})(jQuery);

Or you can download it here.

Installing passenger on ubuntu has some issues

admin — Sun, 20 Dec 2009 07:46:14 +0000

I followed the instructions on the Ubuntu site and the modrails site and everything would install fine but I could never get passenger to serve pages to apache.

Passenger assumes the permissions of the default apache user. And if you don’t set up your default user as www-data when you install Ubuntu Passenger wont have permission to run the app.

Open up /etc/apache2/envvars and change the www-data user and group to match your default user and group and you should be set.

Watch the whitespace

admin — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 04:51:03 +0000

I have been spending the last hour wondering why this doesnt work.

Post.find_by_sql["SELECT title FROM posts WHERE author = ? AND created > ?", author_id, start_date]

Its because it needed to be like this:
Post.find_by_sql ["SELECT title FROM posts WHERE author = ? AND created > ?", author_id, start_date]

yeah, you need that whitespace there.

Making a sortable, dynamic grid

admin — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 05:56:56 +0000

I came up against an interesting challenge on a current project. This was actually pretty fun to figure out. Here is what I came up with.

I needed to display a grid with columns and rows that had information in each cell. The information in the cells needed to be dynamic, or change based on a UI perspective.

Also, if there were more than 10 rows in a column, the remaining cells needed to wrap to the next column.

This is definitely a job for a helper so I wrote these methods for the helper to render this sortable, dynamic grid. So far it seems to be holding up when rendering grids of various columns and rows.

def my_grid
@my_data = ”
@my_data += ‘’

@my_data += ‘
’

num = 1

#this starts a new column for each category

@columns.each do |col|

cell = Cell.find(:all, :conditions => [‘category_id = ?’, col]) rescue nil

count = cell.size

item = 0

itemtotal = 1

cell.each do |row|

#if this is the 0 item start a new column

if item == 0

@my_data += self.start_col

end

score = row.get_my_score(row.id, @grid, @user).to_s

@my_data += self.list_item(score, row, itemtotal)

#if this is the 9th item, or is the last of the cells, close the column and reset count

item += 1

if item == 10 || itemtotal == count

@my_data += self.end_col(num)

num = num.to_i + 1

item = 0

end

itemtotal += 1

end

end

@my_data += ‘
’

@my_data += ‘

’
#return @my_data
end

def start_col
@start = ‘
’
@start +=
‘
return @start
end

def end_col(num)
@end = ‘’
@end += num.to_s
@end += ‘’
return @end
end

def list_item(score, row, item)
@list = ‘
+ score +‘>’

#some stuff here…

@list += ‘

’

return @list

end

Upload CSV to multiple tables

admin — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 06:44:18 +0000

Uploading a CSV to a single table is easy enough, but what if elements of your CSV go to separate tables and needed to be primary and foreign keys for each other?

I have two tables, Categories and Items. I have a CSV that looks like this:
Category One,Item One,Item one descriptions,, ,Item two,Item two descriptione,, ,Item three,Item three description,, ,Item four,Item four description,, Category Two,Item five,Item five description,, ,Item six,Item six description,, ,Item seven,Item seven description,,

My controller method looks like this:
require 'csv' def csv_import @parsed_file=CSV::Reader.parse(params[:csv][:file]) @parsed_file.each do |row| category = row[0] if !category.nil? c = Category.new c.name = row[0] c.save @new_cat = c.id end
i = Item.new i.name = row[1] i.description = row[2] i.category_id = @new_cat i.save end
redirect_to :controller => 'category', :id => params[:csv][:item]
And my form looks like this:
<% form_for :csv, :url=>{:controller=>"category", :action=>"csv_import"}, :html => { :multipart => true } do |f| -%>





        Select a CSV File :
     

       <%= f.file_field :file -%>
     



       <%= submit_tag 'Submit' -%>

<% end -%>

Hosting on AWS part 2

admin — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 06:35:51 +0000

Now i just want to run my rails app in production mode through apache instead of mongrel. Here is what I did.

First I needed to install apache.
yum install httpd

Then kill the existing mongrel process
pkill -9 mongrel_rails -u root

With apache installed I now have the directories I need. I moved my rails app from my webuser directory to my apache directory at /var/www/html.

Now i can start apache
apachectl start
If you go to your primary dns in a browser you should see the default fedora apache page.

Next I installed passenger
gem install passenger

Then the apache mod
passenger-install-apache2-module

Since I was using one of the pre-set AMI’s I am promted to install a few things.
* To install GNU C++ compiler:
Please run yum install gcc-c++ as root.

* To install Apache 2 development headers:
Please run yum install httpd-devel as root.

* To install Apache Portable Runtime (APR) development headers:
Please run yum install apr-devel as root

Then add these to the httpd.conf file
LoadModule passenger_module /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/passenger-2.2.5/ext/apache2/mod_passenger.so PassengerRoot /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/passenger-2.2.5 PassengerRuby /usr/bin/ruby

And add a virtual host to the conf file the way described in the apache mod install instructions.

Then restart apache
apachectl restart

That was it. My rails app is now running through apache.

Hosting on AWS

admin — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 05:49:05 +0000

Just some notes from setting up a Ruby on Rails instance on AWS EC2.

During the set up process of the instance you will be able to download a private key. Put that private key in a safe directory and chmod it to 400.

Then after completing the setup of the instance and you can see that it is running, go to your command line and enter:

ssh -i /path/to/key/[name of key].pem root@[public DNS]

That will get you logged in. You will need to go to /home/[webuser] to checkout your web project from SVN. But first you need to install SVN:

yum -y install subversion

Now you can check out:

svn checkout http://address.of.your.repository/and/path projectname

cd in to config and nano the database.yml, make the needed changes, then nano the environment.rb and edit the rails version if needed. Then make the database:

mysql

create database [whatever]

exit

Then cd into the root of the new project you just checked out:
rake db:migrate

And if you have fixtures to test with

rake db:fixtures:load

Amazon runs mogrel so to test your project you can add this shell script:

#!/bin/sh cd /home/webuser/[project name]/log && rm mongrel.pid -f pkill -9 mongrel_rails -u root cd /home/webuser/[project name] && /usr/bin/mongrel_rails start -e development -p 80 -d

chmod that to 755 and run ./restart.sh

Go to the public DNS address in your browser and you should see your project.

Next, I will be attempting to run Rails through Apache on AWS with passenger instead of mongrel. For now this got my project online.