Open up your browser and visit http://www.hexxie.com. You can also go to anything.hexxie.com and everything.hexxie.com, which will resolve to your local machine (assuming it’s localhost at 127.0.0.1).

How it works

Super simple. I just pointed hexxie.com and *.hexxie.com to 127.0.0.1, which is everyone’s localhost address. If you’re on Rails just append the port number as usual. http://hexxie.com:3000 or on Django http://hexxie.com:8000. Or you can always fire those guys up on port :80 with sudo ./script/server -p80 for Rails
or sudo django-admin.py runserver 80

To set up your own just configure DNS to point your domain to 127.0.0.1 for the IP address. No more futzing with /etc/hosts

Originally got this tip from http://tbaggery.com/2010/03/04/smack-a-ho-st.html who has created his own service at smackaho.st

The word “Hexe” is German for “Witch”. I have a dog named “Hexxie” after the German word and that is the origin of the domain name hexxie.com, in case you’re wondering.

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<%form_for(@model) do |f| %>
<script type="text/javascript" charset="utf-8">
  function change_state_select(state_code
  {
    new Ajax.Request('/country_select/'+state_code
    {
      method: 'get',
      onSuccess: function(transport) {
        $('state_select').replace(transport.responseText);
      }
    });
  }
 </script>
 <%= f.select :country,
   Carmen::COUNTRIES,
   {},
   { : onchange => "change_state_select(this.options[this.selectedIndex].value);" }
%>
<div id='state_select'></div>

***Note the : onchange should really be one word but an emoticon shows up otherwise nchange ***
Since not all countries are supported I need to execute some conditional logic in the action country_select. If the country is supported I’ll return a snippet of html containing a select field that my form will use. If the country is not supported I’ll return a text field so that the user can write in their state/province.

class CountrySelectController < ApplicationController
  def country_selecet
      begin
         @states = Carmen::states(params[:id])
      rescue
         @states = nil
      end
      render :partial => "country_select/states"
  end
end

In the final partial that is rendered there is either a select field or a text field

<div id="state_select">
  <% if @states.nil? %>
    <%= text_field_tag :model, :state %>
  <% else %>
    <%= select :model, :state, Carmen::states(@states)%>
  <% end %>
</div>

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1. Using Prototype to Access Form Data
2. Extending Rails Form Builders
3. Problem slash Bug in Rails with attr_accessor and Datetime Select Fields

./script/plugin install http://svn.viney.net.nz/things/rails/plugins/acts_as_taggable_on_steroids
./script/generate acts_as_taggable_migration
rake db:migrate

Then in your model

class Post < ActiveRecord::Base
    acts_as_taggable
 end

And usage is as follows

p = Post.find(:first)
p.tag_list # []
p.tag_list = "Funny, Silly"
p.save
p.tag_list # ["Funny", "Silly"]
p.tag_list.add("Great", "Awful")
p.tag_list.remove("Funny")

#to find...
Post.find_tagged_with('Funny, Silly')
Post.find_tagged_with('Funny, Silly', :match_all => true)

To use this in a form and let users enter a comma separated list of tag names...

form_for @post do |f|
f.text_field :tag_list

And to get a tag cloud

  #controller
  class PostController < ApplicationController
    def tag_cloud
      @tags = Post.tag_counts
    end
  end

  # and in view...
  <style>
  .css1 { font-size: 1.0em; }
  .css2 { font-size: 1.2em; }
  .css3 { font-size: 1.4em; }
  .css4 { font-size: 1.6em; }
  </style>

  <% tag_cloud @tags, %w(css1 css2 css3 css4) do |tag, css_class| %>
    <%= link_to tag.name, { :action => :tag, :id => tag.name }, :class => css_class %>
  <% end %>

*Note. If you have a controller "tags_controller.rb" and the auto generated (if you used ./script/generate) helper file "tags_helper.rb" you'll need to make sure to copy the contents of the plugin lib module of the same name, into the helper file. You'll get an error otherwise.

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# RAILS_ROOT/config/initializers/datetime.rb
Time::DATE_FORMATS[:date] = "%a %b %d, %Y"
Time::DATE_FORMATS[:time] = "%I:%M%p"
# ...

Next I set up a helper function which will string together the :date and :time formats and remove the leading zero in the hour with the .gsub method on the string.

  # RAILS_ROOT/app/helpers/application_helper.rb
  def fulltime(created_at)
    created_at.to_s(:date)+" "+created_at.to_s(:time).gsub(/^0/,'').downcase
  end

In a view I’ll just pass the timestamp to the fulltime function

fulltime(@post.created_at)

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2. Custom Date Formats for Your Rails Application
3. Problem slash Bug in Rails with attr_accessor and Datetime Select Fields

# RAILS_ROOT/app/helpers/custom_tag_builder.rb
class CustomTagBuilder < ActionView::Helpers::FormBuilder

  def self.create_tagged_field(method_name)
    define_method(method_name) do |label, *args|
      label_name = args.first.blank? ? label : args.first[:label] # my change
      @template.content_tag("p",
        @template.content_tag("label",
          label_name.to_s.humanize, :for => "#{@object_name}_#{label}") +" 
 "+ super)
    end
  end  

  field_helpers.each do |name|
    create_tagged_field(name)
  end
end

You can then use this in your views

form_for @your_model, :builder => CustomTagBuilder do |f|
  f.text_field :fullname
  f.text_field :email, :label => "Email (will not be published)"

My change tests for the presence of a label argument otherwise using the name of the form field/model attribute. In this case the fullname attribute will be outputted as “Fullname” while “Email (will not be published)” as the label for the email text field.

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2. Onchange Event Fired from Select Field in Rails Form
3. Using Prototype to Access Form Data

You can visit the application by going to http://seanbehan.com/reader. The application just parses a bunch of RSS feeds and displays them.
It uses the Feedzirra library, which I’ve also written about http://seanbehan.com/ruby-on-rails/installing-feedzirra-rss-parser-on-ubuntu-8/.

I’m using Phussion Passenger and Ruby Enterprise Edition from the folks at Mod Rails. Installing both Phussion Passenger and Ruby Enterprise Edition is simple and a very well documented process. However, you’ll need to download and compile them from source. If you install Ruby Enterprise Edition (REE) it comes w/ Passenger so you won’t need to download it separately. I recommend going with REE. http://www.rubyenterpriseedition.com/download.html

Installing Ruby Enterprise Edition

Here are the commands to download and install (change the X.X.X to the package you’ve actually downloaded).

wget http://rubyforge.org/frs/download.php/68719/ruby-enterprise-1.8.7-2010.01.tar.gz
tar xzvf ruby-enterprise-X.X.X.tar.gz
./ruby-enterprise-X.X.X/installer

When you run the installer you’ll be prompted for an installation location. Just hit enter to install in the default location. Follow the instructions from there and remember to copy/paste any code that they give you.

Official Instructions on installation for Passenger on its own are available here http://www.modrails.com/install.html I’ve written about setting up an entire box w/ Passenger here http://seanbehan.com/ruby-on-rails/new-ubuntu-slice-apache-mysql-php-ruby-on-rails-git-and/ If you already have Passenger installed and want to use REE just download and install REE and it’ll recompile Passenger with REE support if you follow the instructions.

*** If you install REE you’ll need to either link or reinstall all your gems. I linked the REE gem with the one in /usr/bin so that I can run gem install and REE will be aware of it.

ln -s /opt/ruby-enterprise-X.X.X/bin/gem /usr/bin/gem

The VirtualHost

If you have Passenger and REE successfully installed you’ll need to modify your VirtualHost file and add Rails application information to it.

<VirtualHost *>
  # Normal virtual host info
  ServerName seanbehan.com
  ServerAlias *.seanbehan.com
  DocumentRoot /var/www/seanbehan.com/wordpress

  # Rails info goes here
  Alias /reader /var/www/seanbehan.com/reader/public
  <Location /reader>
    PassengerAppRoot /var/www/seanbehan.com/reader
    RailsEnv production
  </Location>
</VirtualHost>

The “Location” directive tells apache to forward requests starting with /reader to the directory
/var/www/seanbehan.com/reader/public which is the location of our Rails app. However, we need to add the PassengerAppRoot assignment so that it knows where the actual application lives.

Routing in Rails with Relative Path

And finally, your Rails application will need to be aware of the relative url prefix assigned to each route. Normally, you could do this w/ the :path_prefix at the individual route level like so

map.resources :feeds, :path_prefix => "reader"

This will work but you can add a line to your RAILS_ROOT/config/environments/production.rb file which will handle all your routes for you. This way you don’t need to setup a relative path on your development environment work.

# in RAILS_ROOT/config/environments/production.rb
config.action_controller.relative_url_root = '/reader'

Final Thoughts

Remember Ruby Enterprise Edition is the new Ruby Interpreter that your Rails web applications are using. If you
have any gem or rake issues make sure that you’re using the same interpreter that REE is using. Look in the location
installation of REE “/opt/ruby-ent…” bin/gem or bin/rake and see if that helps. I just linked those to the standard /usr/bin/gem and /usr/bin/rake and everything worked fine.

Also I’ve read some people have trouble using the alias with passenger. This may be an older issue but works for me without a problem on Ubuntu (latest).

Here are some useful resources I found along the way…

http://robots.thoughtbot.com/post/159806388/phusion-passenger-with-a-prefix

http://www.modrails.com/documentation/Users%20guide.html#deploying_rails_to_sub_uri

http://www.modrails.com/documentation/Users%20guide.html#RailsBaseURI

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/848258/server-prefix-and-rails-routes

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<?php
$to = "jane@example.com";
$subject = "Hello World!";
$body = "This will be sent from email-addr@example.com";
$headers = "From: email-addr@example.com\r\nX-Mailer: php";
mail($to, $subject, $body, $headers);

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mysqldump -u root -p database_name --skip-add-drop-table --skip-lock-tables > database_name.sql

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date('Y-m-d H:i:s');

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