Pass By Value » git

Getting started with Heroku and Rails 3.1

Trent — Wed, 16 Nov 2011 10:31:42 +0000

Pre-requesites:

RVM on your local machine with Ruby 1.9.2
Heroku account

Switch to the 1.9.2 version of Ruby, install the rails and heroku gems, create your rails 3.1 application

Terminal

$ rvm 1.9.2
$ gem install rails
$ gem install heroku
$ rails new tickets
$ cd tickets

Add in the nifty-generators gem:

/Gemfile

gem "nifty-generators", :group => :development

Terminal

$ bundle install

Generate the layout

Terminal

$ rails generate nifty:layout

Now make compatible with Rails 3.1 asset pipeline (assuming this is only temporary until gem is updated for Rails 3.1)

Rename /public/stylesheets/application.css to nifty.css and move to the /app/assets/stylesheets dir
Delete /public/stylesheets
Update javascript to use “application” instead of :defaults

/app/views/layouts/application.html.erb

<%= javascript_include_tag "application" %>

Generate the scaffold for a ticket, migrate the schema, and start the server to test locally at http://localhost:3000

Terminal

$ rails generate nifty:scaffold ticket name:string description:text
$ bundle exec rake db:migrate
$ rails server

Point to our tickets controller as default
Remove public/index.html
Update root route in routes.rb

/config/routes.rb

root :to => 'tickets#index'

Initialise the git repository and perform first commit

Terminal

$ git init
$ git add .
$ git commit -m "Initial commit"

Create the app on heroku using the cedar stack (its the only stack that currently supports Rails 3.1)

Terminal

$ gem install heroku
$ heroku create --stack cedar

Notice that there is now a new remote on our git repo

Terminal

$ git remote -v

Heroku uses postgresql by default, update gems

/Gemfile

gem 'sqlite3', :group => :development
gem 'pg', :group => :production

Terminal

$ bundle install

Commit changes

Terminal

$ git add .
$ git commit -m "Updated database gems to cater for postgresql on Heroku"

Push app to heroku, migrate the schema on the server, and open a browser to see it running

Terminal

$ git push heroku master
$ heroku run rake db:migrate
$ heroku open

Installing the custom domain Add-on

Notice that it has a unique subdomain, lets give it our own sub-domain name through the Custom Domain add-on

Terminal

heroku add custom_domain
heroku domains:add tickets.passbyvalue.com

Add a CNAME record on the DNS for the preferred subdomain (note that top level domain DNS rules are different) that we want to use and now try it out!

http://tickets.passbyvalue.com

Tutorial: http://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/custom-domains

Jump into the console and see under the covers

Terminal

$ heroku run console

Wow! How cool is that! My goal now is to give up my own VPS for hosting my Rails apps. I’m thinking that it come out cheaper using Heroku.

Note: there are some limitations that you need to be aware of. For example you have limited write access to the file system so if you want your users to upload images then you need to incorporate different cloud offerings for this to work, like Amazon S3. The paperclip gem has support for this. This gives an insight in how your thinking has to change when you start to leverage cloud services and augment them together. Something to discuss further another time…

Version controlling WordPress themes on simple hosts

Trent — Sat, 17 Jul 2010 12:12:07 +0000

Here’s a quick tip if your WordPress host is quite simple and only provides FTP access and no version control tools (svn, git) or specific syncing tools (rsync)

Use version control for the theme on your local machine (where you run your dev WordPress environment), then use syncing capability of FTP tool (Cyberduck for MacOSX has this feature) to promote the changes to your host.

Remember, version control is the only way to sensibly manage changes to your theme – editing through the WordPress theme editor on your host is a really bad way to manage it!

Git repositories with Slicehost

Trent — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 11:31:09 +0000

No doubt I am really happy with my Slicehost VPS, it has been so hassle free! The best part about Slicehost is all the amazing articles they provide to help you get going with your slice.

I’ve setup my slice to host my private git repositories, particularly since I wanted to use them with Rails and Capistrano. This article provide to be just what I needed:

http://articles.slicehost.com/2009/5/13/capistrano-series-setting-up-git

The article even shows you how to secure the shell that the git user has to avoid anyone SSHing into your box with their ID. However, it doesn’t tell you what to do when you want to create another repository as you cannot switch to the git user while ever it is using the git-shell as opposed to a normal shell. The trick is you need to switch with the root user as only they are allowed to provide an alternative shell. Here are the commands once you have logged into your slice with a user that is able to sudo:

$ sudo su --shell /bin/bash git
$ cd /home/git
$ mkdir project2
$ cd project2
$ git --bare init
$ exit

Now your repository is good to go and you can follow the steps from “Making your first commit” section.

Git for dummies

Trent — Sat, 31 Jan 2009 06:41:44 +0000

Only just started to finally get stuck into learning git. It certainly seems to be revolutionising the way we do version control. I’m pretty hooked on subversion and I have to admit, I thought that was as good as it gets! But the hype around git to much to ignore.

Here’s some resources I’ve found really useful to get (git) going:

Resources

GitCasts by Scott Chacon. Screencasts are for me one of the best ways to learn things, these casts, although very quick, give you that good leg up.
Git from the bottom up by John Wiegley. There is a link from his blog entry to a paper he has put together on his understanding of Git. Always good to read some theory!
Git – SVN crash course from the offical git site. A great place to start if like me, you’re already familiar with svn.
Github’s Git Cheat Sheet is a good resource too!

Accessing github from behind a proxy

Trent — Fri, 02 Jan 2009 04:11:36 +0000

If you’re behind a proxy which restricts outbound ports (i.e. only port 80 and 443), then you’ll be pleased to know that you can still access Github.

Rather than using the git:// protocol (defaulting to port 9418), you can use the HTTP protocol to do the same thing! Article on Github about it here.

git clone http://github.com/justinfrench/formtastic.git

It also works for Rails plugins!

script/plugin install http://github.com/justinfrench/formtastic.git

Don’t forgot you need to set environment variable http_proxy to tell Git to use the proxy or or can set it in git-config. The example below sets it at the global level:

git config --global --add http.proxy http://myproxy:8080