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You might have missed the announcement, but a couple of months ago I launched Rails Inside in order to allow Ruby Inside to focus more on Ruby-specific news. Due to the obvious crossover between the audiences, I promised that I'd start a regular series of Ruby Inside posts highlighting some of the most interesting Rails news from Rails Inside - just in case you're into Rails but not so into it that you want to subscribe to Rails Inside! This is the first post of that series.

Recent highlights have included:

Hot for more Rails news? Perhaps you'd like to head over to Rails Inside and subscribe. You can grab the RSS feed or get it via e-mail.

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What's Hot on Github is a monthly post highlighting new and/or interesting projects within the Ruby community that are hosted on Github. Github has become an extremely popular place for Ruby and Rails developers to congregate lately, so I wanted to list some of the new projects, and some of the updated ones, that I have found interesting and that are too small for their own blog post.

This month's picks:

• Dust - Tool for finding unused or useless code
• can_search - Chain named scopes in a search query
• One inch punch - Time tracking with bash
• Cardjour - Share your vCard over bonjour
• view_specify - Auto-generate RSpec view specs by interrogating your existing views
• Spree - An open-source e-commerce application
• randexp - Generate random data from a Regular Expression
• active_shipping - Shipping extensions for active_merchant
• Webby - A lightweight and flexible website management system
• Shinmun - A small and beautiful blogging engine

Full disclosure: I (Zach) work with the guys who wrote view_specify and we've worked with the people responsible for active_shipping and one_inch_punch.

Have any projects to add or want to recommend a project for next month's post? Please leave a comment.

While it was pretty momentous last year when Mac OS X (Leopard) was released with full support for Ruby and Rails included with the OS, it seems that the Ruby train is still rolling with Apple.

A recent InfoQ article highlights some ways that Apple is using Ruby that you might have missed - including:

• The iPhone Configuration Web Utility - A tool written in Ruby on Rails for allowing enterprise customers to manage iPhones.
• The SproutCore JavaScript framework - Which is designed for making desktop-like applications on the web and is used in Apple's new MobileMe applications. SproutCore is installed as a gem, uses generators written in Ruby to create resources and it utilizes Merb to generate HTML artifacts. (Update: SproutCore isn't a Ruby project / Ruby-based system per se, but it does offer some good tie-ins to the Ruby ecosystem.)
• The MacRuby project - Apple's own port of Ruby to the Objective-C runtimes - which should make it much easier to integrate with Cocoa for Desktop development.

I haven't played with the MobileMe web applications much, but I recall thinking that they looked fairly impressive. Have any other Ruby developers tried SproutCore yet? How's it working out for you?

Post supported by Brightbox: Brightbox is a specialist European Rails hosting company. Each Brightbox server includes an optimised Ruby on Rails stack, SAN storage and access to a managed MySQL database cluster. They also manage dedicated clusters for large scale Rails deployments. Click here to learn more..

If you’re in the market for a new hosting provider for your Ruby on Rails application, you might take a look at the new options for Rails Boxcar. We recently expanded our service offerings into three pricing tiers as well as custom packages for those who need a bit more.

A few things that we’ve recently added support for:

• Provide us your SSH key during sign up!
  • Allows us to keep your server even more secure by avoiding sending passwords over the net
  • Other fun features related to this coming soon
• Auto-configured Nginx w/Mongrel cluster
• Phusion Passenger (mod_rails) support! (for those with mixed-environments)
• Continued development of Boxcar Conductor)
• ...more in the works!

The best part is that we can get you up and running with a new Boxcar now for as low as $59/month USD.

For more information, visit: http://railsboxcar.com

If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to contact us.

Happy Holidays!

Wow, 2007 has gone by really fast. I’ve been fairly busy wrapping up projects and getting ready to start new ones at Planet Argon. I’m sure that when many of you start a new project… you look back at what you’ve learned from previous ones. Even throughout iterations in a project, we try our best to have retrospectives to be sure that we’re all learning from what has and hasn’t worked. A few weeks ago, I decided to drop a note to the members of the Business of Rails community to ask people to share some of their lessons from the year. My goal was to get people to share their experiences from over the year with other members of the community and see where the dialogue takes us into 2008.

As expected… I got some great responses, which I encourage you to read for yourself. You might even participate in the conversation(s) and share your experiences. We’d love to hear them.

Side note… I’d like to thank all of you who have participated in the Business of Rails community over the year. It was an idea that came to me during RailsConf 2007 after I participated on a panel with other business leaders in the Ruby on Rails community. We now have over 800 members on the mailing list! I’ve learned a lot from the community and hope more of you decide to join. :-)

Earlier today, Vincent Foley was kind enough to hand over maitenance of the the ShortURL project on RubyForge to me. He first released it back in 2005, which I blogged about as RubyURL was the first shortening service that it supported (and is the default). Unfortunately, the release of RubyURL 2.0 broke backwards compatibility and Vincent wasn’t maintaining it anymore. So, earlier, I decided to patch this and got a new version released that now works with the current RubyURL site.

While working on the code, I decided to extend the compatible services to include moourl and urlTea.

These updates are available in ShortURL version 0.8.4.

Install the ShortURL gem

Installation is a snap… (like 99.7% of rubygems…)

  ~ > sudo gem install shorturl                                                                                                                                                                                                           Password:

  Successfully installed shorturl-0.8.4
  1 gem installed
  Installing ri documentation for shorturl-0.8.4...
  Installing RDoc documentation for shorturl-0.8.4.  

Using ShortURL

The ShortURL gem provides the ShortURL library, which you can use from any Ruby application.

Using the ShortURL library

  ~ > irb                                                                                                                                                                                                                           
  irb(main):001:0> require 'rubygems'
  => true
  irb(main):002:0> require 'shorturl'
  => true
  irb(main):003:0> ShortURL.shorten( 'http://www.istwitterdown.com' )
  => "http://rubyurl.com/P9w" 

As you can see…it’s really straight forward.

Let’s try it with a few other services.

irb(main):004:0> ShortURL.shorten( 'http://www.istwitterdown.com', :moourl )
=> "http://moourl.com/fvoky" 
irb(main):005:0> ShortURL.shorten( 'http://www.istwitterdown.com', :tinyurl )
=> "http://tinyurl.com/2t3qmh" 

Using the shorturl command-line tool

Many people don’t know that ShortURL provides a command-line tool, which you can use after installing the gem.

  ~ > shorturl http://istwitterdown.com                                                                                                                                                                                               
  http://rubyurl.com/Lwk

If you’d like to see more services provided than the ones listed here, please submit feature requests and/or patches on the rubyforge project.

• http://rubyforge.org/projects/shorturl/

ShortURL Documentation

To see the latest documentation for the project, please visit:

• http://rubyforge.org/projects/shorturl/

My favorite part about this? My rbot plugin for RubyURL works again!

Happy URL-shortening!

Picture yourself and your laptop. It’s been over a day and you’re sitting on a train with a group of Rails developers with a view like this over your shoulder.

Hacking and reading on the train.

Enjoying the sceneary of the U.S.A.

Two years ago… a group of us went from Portland to Chicago for RailsConf 2006 on the Argon Express.

I know this is a tad late… but uf you haven’t purchased plane tickets to Portland yet for CabooseConf or RailsConf 2008 and would be interested in catching the train from somewhere the East Coast, email me and we’ll talk. I’m hoping to organize the Argon Express 2008 over next few weeks.

This is inspired by a recent post by Seth Godin titled, Things you don’t understand, where he shared a list of things that he probably could understand if he put your mind to it, but doesn’t. I decided to post a list of five (5) things in response within the context of Ruby/Rails.

I’m really interested in various things but am really unable to prioritize them high enough to spend the time to understand them.

• RSpec User Stories
• Using Selenium with RSpec
• JQuery (Graeme speaks highly of it)
• JSSpec (BDD for Javascript)
• Using the Google Charts API with Rails

What about you? What’s your list of things that you’d like to understand more about?

We’re starting a new project and I’m finding myself adding things to the code base that we’ve done in the past… hence the last few posts. As we’re doing this, I’d like to highlight some of the little things that we do on each project to maintain some consistency and in that process reach out to the community for alternative approaches.

I’m intrigued by the vendor everything concept, but we haven’t yet adopted this on any of our projects (yet).

What we have been doing is to maintain a REQUIRED_GEMS file in the root directory of our Rails application.

For example:

$ cat REQUIRED_GEMS

actionmailer
actionpack
actionwebservice
activerecord
activesupport
cgi_multipart_eof_fix
daemons
fastercsv
fastthread
feedtools
gem_plugin
image_science
mongrel
mongrel_cluster
mysql
rails
rake
RedCloth
Ruby-MemCache
soap4r
uuidtools

Everybody on the team (designers/developers) knows to look here to make sure they have everything installed when beginning to work on the application.

This has worked fairly well from project to project but since we’re starting a new project, I’m curious if anybody has some better ways to approach this. Should we look more seriously at the vendor everything approach or are there any alternative approaches?

As we’re migrating away from Subversion to Git, I’m having to learn a lot about git-svn. Andy has posted a few articles on this topic, but I wanted to share a quick tip that I find myself forgetting.

Working with Subversion branches

While you’re hopefully already familiar with how great local branches are with Git, you might not know that you can connect local branches to remote branches in your Subversion repository. This allows those of us who are using Git locally to work against Subversion branches.

I’m going to assume the following:

• Your team is using Subversion
• Your team already has a branch that you’re working in
• Your team is following Subversion directory conventions (branches/, tags/, and trunk/)
• You have Git installed (with SVN extensions)

Checkout the Subversion project with Git

Please visit Andy’s tutorial, Git SVN Workflow, for a more detailed explanation of the following commands.

First, we’ll initialize your new local Git repository with git-svn.

  git svn init -s http://svn.yourdomain.com/repos/project_name

Now, you’ll change directories to your new Git repository.

  cd project_name

Let’s fetch all previous revisions into your local repository¹.

  git svn fetch

Great, once this is done… you’re master (local) branch is linked to trunk/.

Mapping a local repository to a remote branch

Assuming that your team is working in a Subversion branch on the current iteration of work. Our team has a naming convention for branches for each iteration. For example, if we’re in Iteration 18, we’ll write this as ITER-018 everywhere (Basecamp, Lighthouse, Subversion, etc…). At the start of each iteration, we create a new branch with this naming convention.

For ITER-018, the Subversion branch would be located at:

• http://svn.yourdomain.com/repos/project_name/branches/ITER-018

If you were to do a git branch -r, you should see ITER-018 show up in the list. Now, the one thing that wasn’t clear when I first read the git-svn documentation was that you can’t just checkout that branch with one command. In fact, this has tripped me up a few times.

First, you’ll need to checkout a new local branch. I’ve opted to come up with my own convention for local branches and in this case, I’ll name it iter_018.

  git co -b iter_018

So, now I’m in the iter_018 branch, which is local. I’m currently still mapped to trunk/, which isn’t what we want. However, all we need to do is reset where Git is currently pointed to. We can run git reset to point this to the ITER-018 branch.

  git reset --hard ITER-018

That’s it! Now, the local iter_018 branch will point to branches/ITER-018 in your Subversion repository. This will allow you to work with your existing repository branch and still reap the benefits of local Git repositories.

What about master?

Good question. The git reset command that you ran will ONLY apply that that individual local branch. So, master is still pointing to trunk/. This will allow you to have several local branches that map to remote branches.

Next Steps…

If you’re working with Git already.. great!

If you’re working in an environment that using Subversion, git svn provides you the ability to start exploring Git without making your entire team switchover. Perhaps your a consultant and working for a client that uses Subversion… no problem!

We’re still using Subversion for past client projects and are considering GitHub, which just launched (to the public) today for future projects. A few of us are already using GitHub for open source projects.

Fun.. I just saw the following tweet pass by as I began to wrap up this post.

Check out Rails on GitHub!

The Gateway Drug… Git reminds me of Cake

Questions?

I know that I glossed over a few things, so feel free to post questions and/or tips for others who are looking to dabble with Git.

¹ You’ll likely have problems if you don’t have a Git authors file specified in your git config.

In a previous post, I showed how we’ve been working on an interactive deployment process for Rails applications to reduce the time it takes to deploy to a Boxcar.

We began to move our Boxcar deployment recipes into it’s own Rails plugin and just made it available on GitHub.

Introducing Boxcar Conductor

The Boxcar Conductor plugin aims to automate the entire process for deploying to your Boxcar. We’re down to just a few simple commands to run to get your application up and running. While mileage may vary with other hosting providers, we did want to open up this work to the community and centralize our work with the community of Boxcar customers who have helped us build and test these tools.

Install Boxcar Conductor

If you’re running on Edge Rails… you can take advantage of the new support for installing plugins in git repositories.

  $ ./script/plugin install git://github.com/planetargon/boxcar-conductor.git

note: If you’re not using edge rails, you can download a tarball and install the plugin manually.

Installing the plugin will add a custom Capfile and config/deploy.rb, which has a few things for you to define based on your Boxcar subscription.

Configure Your Boxcar

Once the plugin is installed, you can run the following task:

  $ cap boxcar:config

This will ask you a few questions about your deployment needs.

• Which database server will you be using? (along with db user/pass info)
• How many mongrels should run in your cluster?

After a few quick multiple choice answers, you’re application is ready to be deployed and you can run an Boxcar-specific deployment task.

  $ cap deploy

We’ve also created a new public project on Lighthouse so that you can submit tickets and ideas to us. With Boxcar, we’re really aiming to remove as many steps from the deployment process that aren’t necessary.

To follow along, visit the project on lighthouse or GitHub.

If you’re interested in learning more about Rails Boxcar, feel free to drop us a line.

Related Posts

• Deploying Rails with an interactive Capistrano recipe to your Boxcar
• Announcing Cobalt and monthly subscriptions for Boxcar

Update. We’ve moved the Boxcar Conductor plugin for deploying Ruby on Rails applications to a new location on GitHub.

• http://github.com/planetargon/boxcar-conductor

You can still submit bugs/feature requests on Lighthouse here:

• Boxcar on Lighthouse

Enjoy!