Archive of Ruby on Rails

Setting up simple OmniAuth authentication with Facebook

Posted on Feb 01 in Ruby on Rails, Tutorials | (11) Comments

If you have watched Ryan Bates’ tutorial Simple OmniAuth you probably already know OmniAuth is awesome. Ryan doesn’t go into details about setting up OmniAuth with Facebook so this post has a couple of pointers to help out in that regard. It’s meant as a continuation to the screencast, so if you haven’t seen it [...]

If you have watched Ryan Bates’ tutorial Simple OmniAuth you probably already know OmniAuth is awesome. Ryan doesn’t go into details about setting up OmniAuth with Facebook so this post has a couple of pointers to help out in that regard. It’s meant as a continuation to the screencast, so if you haven’t seen it start there.

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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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Handling paperclip attachments with the same name

Posted on Jun 16 in Ruby on Rails | (1) Comment

This quick post is about some Paperclip-related code that I see quite frequently that could cause problems. It’s easy to miss this stuff in development and then get major headaches later.

This quick post is about some Paperclip-related code that I see quite frequently that could cause problems. It’s easy to miss this stuff in development and then get major headaches later.

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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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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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