Archive of General

Configuring Nginx and Unicorn

Posted on Jul 09 in General, Ruby on Rails, Scalability | (13) Comments

I first heard about Unicorn in an interview with 37Signal’s server admin Mark Imbriaco and it made me really curious. There are a few great resources explaining how Unicorn works and a neat benchmark comparing Mongrel, Passenger and Unicorn. I will share my experience playing with Nginx and Unicorn on a Debian Lenny box.

I first heard about Unicorn in an interview with 37Signal’s server admin Mark Imbriaco and it made me really curious. There are a few great resources explaining how Unicorn works and a neat benchmark comparing Mongrel, Passenger and Unicorn. I will share my experience playing with Nginx and Unicorn on a Debian Lenny box.

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Setting up a High Availability Ruby on Rails environment with keepalived, nginx, HA Proxy and Thin on Debian Lenny

Posted on May 15 in General, Ruby on Rails, Scalability, Tutorials | (10) Comments

Contents Configure Keepalived and Nginx Configure HA Proxy Configure Thin Overview Nginx and HA Proxy have similar functions: they can both be used as reverse proxies and load balancers. In our case Nginx will be the reverse proxy and HA Proxy will be the load balancer. Nginx is great for dealing with SSL encryption, gzip [...]

Contents

• Configure Keepalived and Nginx
• Configure HA Proxy
• Configure Thin

Overview

Nginx and HA Proxy have similar functions: they can both be used as reverse proxies and load balancers. In our case Nginx will be the reverse proxy and HA Proxy will be the load balancer. Nginx is great for dealing with SSL encryption, gzip compression or talking to a cache server (Varnish, memcached).

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Building your own Lightbox with Javascript (part 1)

Posted on Feb 21 in General, jQuery, Tutorials | (1) Comment

See the final result of part 1: Demo Why write your own lightbox? The simple answer is: to learn how it’s done. If you’re going to use if for an image gallery, embed flash and videos or even to load Ajax content you are probably better off using one of the many existing lightbox plugins [...]

See the final result of part 1: Demo

Why write your own lightbox?

The simple answer is: to learn how it’s done. If you’re going to use if for an image gallery, embed flash and videos or even to load Ajax content you are probably better off using one of the many existing lightbox plugins (Thickbox, FancyBox). If you plan to use a lightbox for more complex applications like the admin back end of a cms (see the future Drupal 7 Admin Panel ) then you should either fully understand every line of your plugin or write your own.

This tutorial assumes some knowledge of Javascript. If you are just starting Javascript I highly recommend watching Jeffrey Way’s Javascript from null video series on nettuts.com.

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Adding multiple images to a Rails model with paperclip

Posted on Feb 13 in General, Ruby on Rails, Tutorials | (26) Comments

How to add multiple images to a rails model – all in one form!

The Goal

I have been working on improving the admin section of a ski club website. The club sells ski trips online and they need to be able to create new trips from the admin panel. A trip has a title, description, date and price. For marketing reasons when the trip information is displayed on the website a number of pictures related to the trip are also displayed in a slideshow. The goal was to allow admins to add a new trip to the website (including the images) through a single form. Up until now, admins had to create the trip text data and then add the images separately through another form.

The Solution

The solution makes use of Paperclip (the awesome file attachment ruby gem) and the nested attribute functionality that has been added in rails 2.3. If you are new to these I strongly suggest watching these two screencasts from Railscasts: http://railscasts.com/episodes/196-nested-model-form-part-1 and http://railscasts.com/episodes/134-paperclip

To install paperclip add the following line to the environment.rb file and run rake:gems:install

config.gem "thoughtbot-paperclip", :lib => "paperclip"

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How to set up tax rules for sales within Canada in Magento

Posted on Aug 17 in General, Magento, Tutorials | (26) Comments

Objective: Set up the taxation system for Magento for sales within different provinces of Canada. Entering the Tax Rates for Retail Sales in Canada The tax rates used in this example are listed below. DISCLAIMER: the rates and tax rules may not be correct or up to date and are listed here to demonstrate how [...]

Objective: Set up the taxation system for Magento for sales within different provinces of Canada.

Entering the Tax Rates for Retail Sales in Canada

The tax rates used in this example are listed below. DISCLAIMER: the rates and tax rules may not be correct or up to date and are listed here to demonstrate how different rates can be implemented in Magento. Do not use these rates without verifying with the proper authorities that they are correct.

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