Learn capistrano to talk

If you are on OSX you can learn Capistrano to talk. And when you do, he can tell you when your deploy is done.

Just add the following task to your deploy.rb

1
2
3
task :do_speak do
  system("/usr/bin/say -r 250 -v Zarvox 'Sir, your #{rails_env} deploy is done'")
end

And hook it up to run after deploy

1
after 'deploy', 'do_speak'

Now use your imagination, and add more words to Capistrano’s vocabulary :)

If you are using Linux or windows you can use espeak to get the same results

Cheers!

Posted in Programming, Rails, Ruby at May 19th, 2012. No Comments
Tagged with , , . Written by:

How I decreased my Rails startup time by 60%

Today I decreased my Ruby On Rails boot time by ~60%, Yay!
(All credit goes to funny-falcon for the patches and Burke who posted the Gist)

I removed 26 gems from my Gemfile and I noticed a boost with a couple of seconds. From that I begun searching for large Gemfile problems and I stumbled on this gist https://gist.github.com/1688857

It a pretty long page, so I will just summarize how I got my 60%

I use ruby 1.9.3-p125 and rbenv and ruby-build for handling ruby.

First we need to create a manifest file for our new patched ruby

Create a file named ruby-1.9.3-perf with the following content

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
build_package_combined_patch() {
  local package_name="$1"
  {
    curl 'https://raw.github.com/gist/1859082/performance_and_backport_gc.patch' | patch -p1
    autoconf
    ./configure --prefix="$PREFIX_PATH" $CONFIGURE_OPTS
    make -j 8
    make install
  } >&4 2>&1
}

require_gcc

install_package "yaml-0.1.4" "http://pyyaml.org/download/libyaml/yaml-0.1.4.tar.gz"
install_package "ruby-1.9.3-p125" "http://ftp.ruby-lang.org/pub/ruby/1.9/ruby-1.9.3-p125.tar.gz" combined_patch

When we have our manifest file in place we can use ruby-build to build ruby

1
ruby-build ./ruby-1.9.3-perf ~/.rbenv/versions/ruby-1.9.3-p125

And here is my final results!

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
Before

time -p bundle exec rake environment
  real 6.81
  user 5.93
  sys 0.85

After

time -p bundle exec rake environment
  real 3.75
  user 2.82
  sys 0.91

All credit goes to funny-falcon for the patches and Burke who posted the Gist.

Posted in Rails, Ruby at February 29th, 2012. 3 Comments
Tagged with , , , . Written by:

Change PATH environment with Rails and Capistrano

Note to self.

When deploying my RubyOnRails applications with Capistrano and I get errors like this one

1
2
3
4
5
servers: ["app.myserver.com"]
[app.myserver.com] executing command
** [out :: app.myserver.com] sh: bundle: command not found
command finished in 31ms
servers: ["app.myserver.com"]    [app.myserver.com] executing command ** [out :: app.myserver.com] sh: bundle: command not found    command finished in 31ms

Capistrano executes the commands in a very basic shell so the $PATH environment are not the same as when you login through SSH.

One way to solve this is by setting PermitUserEnvironment to yes in /etc/sshd_config and then add the correct PATH to ~/.ssh/environment

I just found another way that was much easier :-)

In you config/deploy.rb add the following snippet

1
2
3
set :default_environment, {
  'PATH' => "/opt/ruby-enterprise/bin/:$PATH"
}

Thats it!

Cheers!

Posted in Programming, Rails, Ruby at June 1st, 2011. 4 Comments
Tagged with , , . Written by:

Nokogiri quote

I just have to share this funny quote from the nokogiri website (for those of you that does not know 鋸 it’s a reeeeeeeeaaally good and fast HTML, XML, SAX, and Reader parser).

XML is like violence – if it doesn’t solve your problems, you are not using enough of it. – http://nokogiri.org/

Cheers!

Posted in Programming, Ruby at April 2nd, 2010. No Comments
Tagged with , , , , . Written by:

Deploying a Sinatra app with Apache and Phusion Passenger a.k.a. mod_rack

My Sinatra + Apache + Passenger setup did not just run :)

Deploying a simple Sinatra rack application under Apache and Phusion Passenger turned out not work out of the box for me.

I already had a virtual host so I decided to deploy with passengers sub URI (sub URI documentation).

To make this work you’ll need Apache installed with Phusion Passenger setup (Passenger installation)

This is what I started with

This is my folders for the already existing website.

1
2
3
4
# Existing homedir
/home/my_web/
# Current webroot
/home/my_web/htdocs

Creating folders and files for Sinatra

The first thing you want to do is to create folders and files for Sinatra.

1
mkdir /home/my_web/sinatra
1
2
3
4
5
6
cd /home/my_web/sinatra
mkdir tmp
mkdir logs
mkdir public
touch app.rb
touch config.ru

Create symlink

Create a symbolic link from our current webroot to the new Sinatra app so that apache/passenger can find it.

1
ln -s /home/my_web/sinatra/public /home/my_web/htdocs/app

Creating the application

We also need a Sinatra application for this to work so lets fill those files.

File: config.ru

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
require 'app'

set :environment, ENV['RACK_ENV'].to_sym
set :app_file,     'app.rb'
disable :run

log = File.new("logs/sinatra.log", "a")
STDOUT.reopen(log)
STDERR.reopen(log)

run Sinatra::Application

File: app.rb

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
require 'rubygems'
require 'sinatra'

before do
  # Strip the last / from the path
  request.env['PATH_INFO'].gsub!(/\/$/, '')
end

get '' do
   "Hello world"
end

Apache configuration

Now we need to setup apache so that it can find our Sinatra app and load it.

The only thing you need to do is add the following line to your existing VirtualHost block:

1
RackBaseURI /app

This line will tell passenger to look into our existing webroot for a symlink thats named app and which points to our rack app. (RackBaseURI documentation)

Virtual host entry

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
<VirtualHost *:80>
  ServerName www.example.com
  ServerAlias example.com
  DocumentRoot /home/my_web/htdocs/
  RackBaseURI /app

  <Directory "/home/my_web/htdocs/">
    Order allow,deny
    Allow from all
    AllowOverride All
  </Directory>
</VirtualHost>

The best part is that you are allowed to specify this option multiple times. So you can easily setup multiple apps under the same virtual host.

Cheers!

Posted in Hosting, Programming, Sinatra at November 30th, 2009. 3 Comments
Tagged with , , , , , , . Written by:

Grouping a timestamp field by date in Ruby On Rails / PostgreSQL

Recently I’ve been working a lot with dates and tonight I had a hard time finding information about how to group a model by date when the model only have a timestamp column.

Lets pretend we have a user model with a created_at attribute which is stored as a timestamp.

If we want to plot a simple graph showing signups per date this is the way to extract them:

1
User.count(:group => "DATE(created_at)")

Thats all there is to it. From this you will get an OrderedHash containing the date and count of users for each date.

One small thing to remember if you are using PostgreSQL. You will need the DATE() function in any ORDER/SELECT statements because PostgreSQL will only select/order by fields thats in the GROUP BY statement and this is a pretty healthy behavior that many databases (no names here) don’t care about. Think about it. If you are grouping all users by date and use * as selector how would the database know which username or email address to display?

This is what happens if you try to group by created_at without DATE() ->

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
>> User.count(:order => 'created_at DESC', :group => ["DATE(created_at)"])                                                
ActiveRecord::StatementInvalid: PGError: ERROR:  column "users.created_at" must appear in the GROUP BY clause or be used in an aggregate function
: SELECT count(*) AS count_all, DATE(created_at) AS date_created_at FROM "users"  GROUP BY DATE(created_at)  ORDER BY created_at DESC
        from /tmp/app/vendor/rails/activerecord/lib/active_record/connection_adapters/abstract_adapter.rb:212:in `log'
        from /tmp/app/vendor/rails/activerecord/lib/active_record/connection_adapters/postgresql_adapter.rb:507:in `execute'
        from /tmp/app/vendor/rails/activerecord/lib/active_record/connection_adapters/postgresql_adapter.rb:985:in `select_raw'
        from /tmp/app/vendor/rails/activerecord/lib/active_record/connection_adapters/postgresql_adapter.rb:972:in `select'
        from /tmp/app/vendor/rails/activerecord/lib/active_record/connection_adapters/abstract/database_statements.rb:7:in `select_all_without_query_cache'
        from /tmp/app/vendor/rails/activerecord/lib/active_record/connection_adapters/abstract/query_cache.rb:62:in `select_all'
        from /tmp/app/vendor/rails/activerecord/lib/active_record/calculations.rb:255:in `execute_grouped_calculation'
        from /tmp/app/vendor/rails/activerecord/lib/active_record/calculations.rb:132:in `calculate'
        from /tmp/app/vendor/rails/activerecord/lib/active_record/calculations.rb:130:in `catch'
        from /tmp/app/vendor/rails/activerecord/lib/active_record/calculations.rb:130:in `calculate'
        from /tmp/app/vendor/rails/activerecord/lib/active_record/calculations.rb:48:in `count'
        from (irb):18

And this is the right way to do it:

1
2
>> User.count(:order => 'DATE(created_at) DESC', :group => ["DATE(created_at)"])
=> #<OrderedHash {"2009-10-14"=>22, "2009-10-25"=>4, "2009-11-04"=>8, "2009-10-15"=>9, "2009-10-26"=>16, "2009-11-05"=>9, "2009-10-16"=>193, "2009-10-27"=>14, "2009-11-06"=>9, "2009-10-17"=>49, "2009-10-28"=>15, "2009-11-07"=>6, "2009-10-18"=>36, "2009-10-29"=>8, "2009-10-19"=>116, "2009-10-30"=>15>

As you may notice the Hash does not look ordered. But if you loop over it you will get them in order:

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
>> User.count(:order => 'DATE(created_at) DESC', :group => ["DATE(created_at)"]).each {|u| puts "#{u[0]} -> #{u[1]}" }
2009-11-07 -> 6
2009-11-06 -> 9
2009-11-05 -> 9
2009-11-04 -> 8
2009-11-03 -> 14
2009-11-02 -> 20
2009-11-01 -> 10
2009-10-31 -> 6
2009-10-30 -> 15
2009-10-29 -> 8
..

And thats how you group a timestamp field with just its date part.

Cheers!

Posted in Databases, PostgreSQL, Rails, Ruby at November 8th, 2009. 3 Comments
Tagged with , , , , . Written by:

How to compile VIM under OS X

Configure and compiling VIM under OS X did not work out-of-the box for me. I did not want to use MacPorts VIM as it’s dependent on ruby (if you like me want that) and I did not find a way of compiling MacPorts VIM against my local ruby.

This post is about how to get VIM compiling on OS X/intel without the use of MacPorts.

Read More…

Posted in Programming at January 11th, 2009. 6 Comments
Tagged with , , , . Written by:

New version of capistrano_colors released.

Just released a new version of capistrano_colors. This is a total rewrite from the last version. This post show some of the bigger changes.
Read More…

Posted in gems, Programming, Projects, Rails, Ruby at January 4th, 2009. No Comments
Tagged with , , , , , . Written by:

Ruby enterprise edition (REE) on Gentoo failed and some performance experience.

Today I got the chance to give Ruby Enterprise Edition a try. We are currently working with a really fun new environment and you do not get better opportunities to try new stuff as when you have a complete new environment thats not in production. So we gave REE a shoot. When compiling REE with got in trouble really fast and this post is about the quick fix to solve it and some of our early performance results.

Read More…

Posted in Hosting, Programming, Rails at December 15th, 2008. 9 Comments
Tagged with , , , , . Written by:

The developers behind Newsdesk have a weblog!

Finally my friends at newsdesk have a blog. They have started off real good with a comparison of three ruby wrappers for Google charts.

I have great expectations from the newsdesk developers blog. If you are a Ruby and Rails developer you should definitely keep and eye on them!

Posted in Life, Rails, Ruby at November 25th, 2008. No Comments
Tagged with , , , , . Written by:

« Older Entries

It's past my bedtime is using WP-Gravatar