Tom Ward's blog · tomafro.net

An updated rails template for gem bundler

A few months ago I wrote a rails template for gem bundler. Since then, bundler has changed a lot, and my template no longer works. Here then is an updated version, based on this gist from Andre Arko. Using it, you should be able to get a rails 2.3.5 project working with bundler in less than 5 minutes.

The first step is to install the latest bundler. At the time of writing, this was 0.9.9.

gem install bundler

Now you should be able to run the template, either on a new project, or on an existing rails 2.3.5 project.

rails -m http://github.com/tomafro/dotfiles/raw/master/resources/rails/bundler.rb <project>

On a fresh project, that should be all you need to do. On an existing that used an older version of bundler, you'll need to remove the old hooks in config/preinitializer.rb and config/environment.rb, and the gems folder.

Explaining the template, step by step

The first step creates the project Gemfile, with rails available in all environments, and ruby-debug included in development. If the project has other gems, they should be added here, rather than using rails own config.gem mechanism.

file 'Gemfile', %{
source 'http://rubygems.org'

gem 'rails', '#{Rails::VERSION::STRING}'

group :development do
  gem 'ruby-debug'
end
}.strip

The next step is get bundler to load correctly. This is done in two stages. First, in config\preinitializer.rb bundler needs to be setup. This adds all the bundled gems to the ruby load path, but doesn't initialise them.

  
append_file '/config/preinitializer.rb', %{
begin
  # Require the preresolved locked set of gems.
  require File.expand_path('../../.bundle/environment', __FILE__)
rescue LoadError
  # Fallback on doing the resolve at runtime.
  require "rubygems"
  require "bundler"
  if Bundler::VERSION <= "0.9.5"
    raise RuntimeError, "Bundler incompatible.\n" +
      "Your bundler version is incompatible with Rails 2.3 and an unlocked bundle.\n" +
      "Run `gem install bundler` to upgrade or `bundle lock` to lock."
  else
    Bundler.setup
  end
end
}.strip

Second, the rails boot process is modified to start the bundler environment. This 'requires' all gems in the bundle, letting them run initialisation code.

gsub_file 'config/boot.rb', "Rails.boot!", %{
  
class Rails::Boot
 def run
   load_initializer
   extend_environment
   Rails::Initializer.run(:set_load_path)
 end

 def extend_environment
   Rails::Initializer.class_eval do
     old_load = instance_method(:load_environment)
     define_method(:load_environment) do
       Bundler.require :default, Rails.env
       old_load.bind(self).call
     end
   end
 end
end

Rails.boot!
}

All that's left now is a little cleaning up. The .bundle folder should never be checked into the code repository as it holds machine-local configuration, so it's added to .gitignore. Finally, bundle install is run to fetch the bundled gems.

append_file '/.gitignore', %{
/.bundle
}

run 'bundle install'

And that's it. I hope you find it useful.

Rails 3 direct column reader

Whilst trying to get my head around arel and it's relationship to ActiveRecord in rails 3, I've updated the simple ColumnReader class I introduced last year. It lets you read the (correctly cast) column values for an ActiveRecord class, without the overhead of instantiating each object.

Here's the updated code:

module ColumnReader
  def column_reader(column_name, options = {})
    name = options.delete(:as) || column_name.to_s.pluralize
    column = columns_hash[column_name.to_s]
  
    self.module_eval %{
      def self.#{name}
        query = scoped.arel.project(arel_table[:#{column_name}])
        connection.select_all(query.to_sql).collect do |value| 
          v = value.values.first
          #{column.type_cast_code('v')}
        end
      end
    }
  end

  ActiveRecord::Base.extend(self)
end

The code isn't that different, though using scoped over construct_finder_sql feels a lot nicer. If you've got suggestions for improvement gist away.

Usage is similar to before, only using the new rails 3 syntax:

class Animal < ActiveRecord::Base
  column_reader 'id'
  column_reader 'name'  
 
  named_scope :dangerous, :conditions => {:carnivorous => true} 
end

Animal.names 
#=> ['Lion', 'Tiger', 'Zebra', 'Gazelle']
 
Animal.limit(1).names 
#=> ['Lion'] (Normal finder options supported)
 
Animal.dangerous.names 
#=> ['Lion', 'Tiger'] (Scoping respected)
 
Animal.ids
#=> [1, 2, 3] (Values cast correctly)

I'm still not entirely convinced of the value of this helper, so if you find a good use tweet me. Enjoy!

Tom Ward · 11th February 2010 · ruby · rails · rails3 · active-record

How to easily use Rails 3 now

Update 10th February 2010:

The instructions below were useful earlier in the development cycle. Now the beta gem has been released, the process is much easier:

gem uninstall bundler
gem install tzinfo builder memcache-client rack rack-test rack-mount 
gem install erubis mail text-format thor bundler i18n
gem install rails --pre

Now that rails 3 is getting closer to release, I wanted to start playing around with it. I've seen a few articles on getting it up and running, but they all seemed a little bit complicated. To use rails 2.3.5 before its release, I just built the gems myself and installed them. It turns out you can easily do the same with rails 3.

First, install rails main dependencies:

gem install rake rack bundler
gem install arel --version 0.2.pre

Next, get the latest rails code from github, and install the rails gems. There may be a few errors you can safely ignore:

git clone git://github.com/rails/rails.git
cd rails
rake install

And bang, you can start your first rails 3 project:

rails ~/apps/playground/rails3

Your existing projects shouldn't be affected as rails is installed as a prerelease gem, but to be safe I'd recommend a tool like rvm to switch to a clean set of gems.

Tom Ward · 24th January 2010 · ruby · rails · rails3 · gems

Tip: Relative paths with File.expand_path

You probably know about the __FILE__ magic constant. It holds the filename of the currently executing ruby source file, relative to the execution directory. So with the following saved as /code/examples/path_example.rb:

puts __FILE__

Running this file from the /code folder will output examples/path_example.rb

This is often used to load files on paths relative to the current file. The way I've used it before is like this:

config_path = File.expand_path(File.join(File.dirname(__FILE__), "config.yml"))

This works, but it's a bit clunky.

What I didn't realise until reading the rails source code the other day, is that File.expand_path can take a second argument - a starting directory. Also, this argument doesn't actually have to be a path to a directory, it also accepts a path to a file. With this knowledge we can shorten the above to the following:

config_path = File.expand_path("../config.yml", __FILE__)

Much simpler.

Tom Ward · 23rd January 2010 · ruby · tip · tiny · file · expand-path

Taking screenshots of web pages with macruby

Whilst playing around with the very exciting macruby last weekend, I thought I'd try building a web page screenshot grabber, based on Ben Curtis' code. The code was very easy to change translate from rubycocoa, looks cleaner and seems to work really well:

framework 'Cocoa'
framework 'WebKit'

class Snapper
  attr_accessor :options, :view, :window
  
  def initialize(options = {})
    @options = options
    initialize_view
  end
  
  def save(url, file)
    view.setFrameLoadDelegate(self)
    # Tell the webView what URL to load.
    frame = view.mainFrame
    req = NSURLRequest.requestWithURL(NSURL.URLWithString(url))
        frame.loadRequest req
    
    while view.isLoading  && !timed_out?
      NSRunLoop.currentRunLoop.runUntilDate NSDate.date
    end
    
    if @failedLoading
      puts "Failed to load page at: #{url}"
    else
      docView = view.mainFrame.frameView.documentView
      docView.window.setContentSize(docView.bounds.size)
      docView.setFrame(view.bounds)
    
      docView.setNeedsDisplay(true)
      docView.displayIfNeeded
      docView.lockFocus
    
      bitmap = NSBitmapImageRep.alloc.initWithFocusedViewRect(docView.bounds)
      docView.unlockFocus

      # Write the bitmap to a file as a PNG
      representation = bitmap.representationUsingType(NSPNGFileType, properties:nil)
      representation.writeToFile(file, atomically:true)
      bitmap.release
    end
  end
  
  private
  
  def webView(view, didFailLoadWithError:error, forFrame:frame)
    @failedLoading = true
  end
  
  def webView(view, didFailProvisionalLoadWithError:error, forFrame:frame)
    @failedLoading = true
  end
  
  def initialize_view
    NSApplication.sharedApplication    
    
    self.view = WebView.alloc.initWithFrame([0, 0, 1024, 600])
    self.window = NSWindow.alloc.initWithContentRect([0, 0, 1024, 600],
      styleMask:NSBorderlessWindowMask, backing:NSBackingStoreBuffered, defer:false)
      
    window.setContentView(view)    
    # Use the screen stylesheet, rather than the print one.
    view.setMediaStyle('screen')
    # Set the user agent to Safari, to ensure we get back the exactly the same content as 
    # if we browsed directly to the page
    view.setCustomUserAgent 'Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10_6_2; en-us)' +
        'AppleWebKit/531.21.8 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0.4 Safari/531.21.10'
    # Make sure we don't save any of the prefs that we change.
    view.preferences.setAutosaves(false)
    # Set some useful options.
    view.preferences.setShouldPrintBackgrounds(true)
    view.preferences.setJavaScriptCanOpenWindowsAutomatically(false)
    view.preferences.setAllowsAnimatedImages(false)
    # Make sure we don't get a scroll bar.
    view.mainFrame.frameView.setAllowsScrolling(false)
  end
  
  def timed_out?
    @start ||= Time.now
    (Time.now.to_i - @start.to_i) > (options[:timeout] || 30)
  end
end

To use:

macruby -r snapper.rb -e "Snapper.new.save('http://tomafro.net', 'tomafro.net.png')"

The next step is to add some command line options, then try compilation and deployment with macrubyc and macruby_deploy

Tom Ward · 30th November 2009 · macruby · screenshots · web · osx