• Publish a simple jQuery plugin
• Publish a simple WordPress plugin, probably a widget
• Use MongoDB in a web app project
• Use Redis in a web app project
• Launch another website to the “public” (all 5 readers!)
• Write a simple web app using the Rails 3 beta
• Deploy a Rails app using the bundler gem
• Learn some basic C#

For those of you who are running Redmine on Phusion Passenger, if you have certain versions of the RedCloth gem installed, you are in for some trouble.

I was getting something along the lines of:

Error message:
    superclass must be a Class (Module given)
Exception class:
    TypeError
Application root:
    /var/rails/redmine-0.7

This was on Ubuntu Hardy 8.04.1, with Apache 2.2.8-1, Ruby Enterprise Edition 080704 (I think), and Passenger 2.0.2, with Redmine from SVN-stable r1729.

A simple solution that worked perfectly for me was to remove ALL version of the RedCloth gem, allowing Redmine to use its own included version of RC.

gem uninstall RedCloth

One of the responses on that bug thread also indicates that gem version 3.0.4 of RedCloth is the most recent version compatible with Redmine, so you could also try using (only) that version.

I’d highly recommend Passenger and RubyEnt for low-volume or even high-traffic production Rails servers. It has greatly simplified my deployment and performance on a VPS with, say, 540MB of RAM is stellar. If you set the idle timeout to something huge, you can get almost Nginx+Mongrel/Thin level performance even on a low-traffic server; otherwise you have to wait a brief time (10-15 seconds) when the app has been idle for a while.

I had been having a lot of trouble using libxml-ruby on Ubuntu Hardy for a hobby project of mine. Any task including libxml calls via require 'xml/libxml' fails with the message:

no such file to load -- libxml_so

To solve this:

sudo apt-get install libxml2 libxml2-dev
cd /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/libxml-ruby-0.7.0
sudo ruby ext/libxml/extconf.rb
sudo make; sudo make install

sudo port install id3lib
sudo ARCHFLAGS="-arch i386" gem install id3lib-ruby -- --build-flags --with-opt-dir=/opt/local

• Ubuntu Server 8.04 AMD64
• Apache2-prefork 2.2.8
• Passenger 2.0.1
• Ruby Enterprise Edition 1.8.6-20080624
• Redmine 0.7 stable (SVN r1547)

My apache vhost is as follows:

<VirtualHost *:80>
  ServerName dev.shanesveller.com

  DocumentRoot /var/rails/redmine-0.7/public

<Directory "/var/rails/redmine-0.7/public">
   Options FollowSymLinks
   AllowOverride None
   Order allow,deny
   Allow from all
</Directory>

  # Custom log file locations
  # ErrorLog  /var/rails/redmine/log/error.log
  # CustomLog /var/rails/redmine/log/access.log combined

</VirtualHost>

This allows me to serve my WordPress blog and my Redmine tracker and use about 260MB of RAM. If you take off the buffers and cache memory, it’s actually more like 110MB.

To enable Passenger and RubyEE in Apache, I used the following file in /etc/apache2/conf.d/passenger:

   LoadModule passenger_module /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/passenger-2.0.1/ext/apache2/mod_passenger.so
   PassengerRoot /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/passenger-2.0.1
   RailsRuby /opt/ruby-enterprise/bin/ruby

The relevant Ubuntu packages are:

apache2 apache2-prefork-dev apache2-mpm-prefork build-essential ruby1.8-dev ruby ri rake irb rdoc libmysqlclient15-dev libopenssl-ruby

This worked for me with mysql installed via macports by the command:

sudo port install mysql5 +server

Source: Code Intensity

RAILS_ROOT = '/var/www/rails'

APPS = {
  'redmine' => %w{5000 5001 5002 5003 5004},
  'typo5' => %w{4000 4001 4002}
  }

for app in APPS.keys
  for port in APPS[app]
    God.watch do |w|
      w.name = '#{app}-thin-#{port}'
      w.interval = 30.seconds # default
      w.start = 'thin start -C #{RAILS_ROOT}/#{app}/config/thin.yml -o #{port}'
      w.stop = 'thin stop -C #{RAILS_ROOT}/#{app}/config/thin.yml -o #{port}'
      w.restart = 'thin restart -C #{RAILS_ROOT}/#{app}/config/thin.yml -o #{port}'
      w.start_grace = 10.seconds
      w.restart_grace = 10.seconds
      w.pid_file = File.join(RAILS_ROOT, '/#{app}/tmp/pids/thin.#{port}.pid')

      w.behavior(:clean_pid_file)

      w.start_if do |start|
        start.condition(:process_running) do |c|
          c.interval = 5.seconds
          c.running = false
        end
      end

      w.restart_if do |restart|
        restart.condition(:memory_usage) do |c|
          c.above = 80.megabytes
          c.times = [3, 5] # 3 out of 5 intervals
        end

        restart.condition(:cpu_usage) do |c|
          c.above = 50.percent
          c.times = 3
        end
      end

      # lifecycle
      w.lifecycle do |on|
        on.condition(:flapping) do |c|
          c.to_state = [:start, :restart]
          c.times = 5
          c.within = 5.minute
          c.transition = :unmonitored
          c.retry_in = 10.minutes
          c.retry_times = 5
          c.retry_within = 2.hours
        end
      end
    end
  end
end

Anyhow, here’s the proper procedure for installing memcached and the gem on Leopard:

• sudo port install memcached libmemcached
• sudo env ARCHFLAGS="-arch i386" gem install memcached -- --with-rlibmemcached-include=/opt/local/include --with-rlibmemcached-lib=/opt/local/lib

I might later look into trying interlock or cache_fu, or following some/all of these direction.

Things I’ve been using/playing with lately:

• GitHub / Gitorious
• Braid – here’s a braid with rspec tutorial
• Railify – [GitHub]
• Linode
• Nginx with an init script
• WordPress 2.5 RC1 and now RC2

Things I’d really like to learn more about:

• RSpec
• Merb – [GitHub]
• LovdByLess open-source social network

Things that sound cool but I know nothing about:

• StrokeDB – an embeddable distributed document database written in Ruby.
• Using gmail with linux daemons – anyone have any good tutorials? I’m specifically looking for using something like exim, sendmail, fetchmail, what have you with a Google Apps domain

Tags: linux, rails, merb, programming