I have a few Ruby scripts that process text files in different ways, that many of my friends find useful. However, most of the people I know are not comfortable running scripts on the command line. The easiest thing for them would be to create a simple webpage where people could upload a file, select a few options, have it processed, and then download the result.
I know it wouldn't be too hard to build something like this in Rails or Merb or something like that, however it seems like a very common problem, so I was wondering if there was already some kind of template, or similar application that I could easily modify, i.e. let the user upload a file, choose a few options, then {fill in code to do something with file}, let the user download the resulting file?
In the past I used Carrierwave to upload user avatars.
If you are used to Rails it's really straightforward.
Let it be a TextFile resource:
gem 'carrierwave'
$ rails g scaffold textfile content:string title:string etc etc
$ rails g uploader textfile
class TextFile < ActiveRecord::Base
attr_accesible :content
mount_uploader :content, TextFileUploader
end
And that is is pretty much all you have to do to obtain the app's skeleton. However, to answer your real question, no, I don't think there is already a rails app that does exactly that.
https://github.com/jnicklas/carrierwave
I found sinatra-fileupload, which pretty perfectly answers my question. It's a very minimalistic framework which works perfectly, I can just plug in the file handling, and change the layout etc a bit. There were many examples of sophisticated Rails plugins linked to databases, with versioning and stuff, but I really wanted the most minimal example.
Related
So in my ruby app I'm using devise and I'd like to have for the admins the ability to log as another user to assist them when they call for support.
But I've no idea how I should do it.
what u are trying to do is to impersonate another user. i havent used this but u can check it out https://github.com/engineyard/user_impersonate
You can try using the Pretender gem.
Pretender is flexible and lightweight - less than 60 lines of code.
Works with many authentication systems including Devise, Authlogic, and Sorcery.
devise_masquerade is well worth a look if you're using Devise.
It does everything you might expect and is quite customizable. It even handles having different model classes for users and admins (e.g. User and AdminUser).
Has anyone used the link-checker gem?
I don't want to use it in a project I want to write a small script to test links on a web app.
I cant seem to figure out how to use it. Trying to require it doesn't work but saying gem 'link-checker' does result in true.
I'm getting nowhere trying to play with it in IRB. Can someone let me know what I am missing?
Did you read the documentation? Link-checker is a small script designed to check links already.
That page shows examples of it running from the command-line, not from inside IRB or Ruby code. In other words, it is a command-line app, not code you require:
Usage:
Just give it the target that you want it to scan. For example, if you have an Octopress site then your output HTML is in the public directory, so call it with:
check-links 'public'
Or if you want to check the links on a live site, then give it a URL instead:
check-links 'http://www.ryanalynporter.com'
If you don’t pass any target, then the default is to scan the “./” directory. If you have a Jekyll site that you deploy to GitHub Pages, then you can check the links with just:
check-links
My rails app fetches a bunch of xml feeds once a day, loads them into the db and then displays them in aggregate. I'm thinking that I can save on server memory if I just output the pages as static files and let them be served directly by the front-end server (nginx in my case). I asked in an IRC room and was told to not use rails and create the files using rake tasks. However, I'm wondering what the easiest way would be to go about doing this. Layout, asset files and content are in different places in rails obviously, so I guess I would need to combine the layout and content and then insert the css/javascript.
Any thoughts/ideas are welcome.
[Solved]
I ended up using the examples from render_to_string from a rake task and made some tweaks to get the following code inside my rake task:
views_path = Rails.root.to_s + "/app/views"
av = ActionView::Base.new(views_path)
av.class_eval do
include ApplicationHelper
end
products = Product.all
a = av.render(:template => "products/show", :layout => "layouts/application", :locals => { :#products => products } )
This then renders both the template and the layout, and allows the use of the #products instance variable inside the template just as you would if you were using a controller.
Then I just need to write the output of the render to a file.
For a task like this you can use Rails' built in caching mechanisms.
There is another stack overflow post which shows some example code of how to build code to write that cache manually from something like a rake task.
Perhaps middleman or jekyll could be used?
I've only used middleman, but you could use a rake task and support script to get the latest xml feeds and stick that into middlemans data dir (i.e. data/feeds.yml), then use your existing layouts to render that yaml file. Middleman and rails share a lot of similar tech for rendering etc.
You'd have to modify your layouts a little bit.
You could probably find gems to replace yaml with something else if you wanted.
I was hoping to make a Rails app usable both as an Engine and as a standalone Application.
Specifically, I have a nascent app which I'd like to plug in to a customer's site, but ideally, I'd like to just as easily use the app as a standalone system. However, if config/environments/*.rb exist in the enginified version of my app, I get an Uninitialized Constant error at the time the app that I'm having take a dependency on my engine starts up; Rails complains that the MyEngineModule::Application constant can't be found in development.rb, which I think is simply a load order issue, since this does NOT occur when I run the app standalone. If I delete development.rb, the original initializers that reference my MyEngineModule::Application complain, so then I tried to delete those, and all is well.
Great, except that the original app doesn't work, since its configuration is gone.
Is there some tweak I can make to the initialization load order (or load paths, in the Engine < Rails::Engine class definition) that would prevent the original configs and initializers from being loaded when in an engine context, and allow me to leave them in place for the app context?
The simpler answer is probably this, but I'm feeling stubborn, and would like to know what it would take to make my original goal possible:
extract the code for MyEngine into an engine, remove the config/environments/* files and config/initializers/* files, and make the client app depend on this.
Make a "new" minimalist app depend on MyEngine, and move the environment files and initializers to NewApp.
Assuming I feel some unnatural compulsion to keep my original application runnable as it was, if I want to prevent the "engine" from loading the "application" configuration, what's the best way to handle that? I presume this is only really a problem during development, because I can prevent the environments/*.rb files from being pulled into the gem itself, but I like being able to test locally while I'm developing the engine and its client app.
Continuing my tradition of answering my own esoteric questions, it seems like one passable alternative is to include a guard clause in the engine's environments/*.rb and the initializers that goes something like this:
if defined? CuteEngine::Application
CuteEngine::Application.configure do
config.whatever = something
end
end
This gets around the problem of having two Rails::Application objects at a relatively small cost. Not very happy about it, but I'll live.
Bumping this for new comers.
Rails 3.1 comes with mountable engines, which sounds like exactly what you are describing. The docs aren't great for converting existing code, but it looks like this will do what you want:
module CuteEngine
class Engine < ::Rails::Engine
isolate_namespace CuteEngine
end
end
In your other app's routes.rb file, you'll add:
mount CuteEngine::Engine, at: "/cuteness"
http://edgeguides.rubyonrails.org/engines.html#mounting-the-engine
http://railscasts.com/episodes/277-mountable-engines
I have just upgraded to rails3 and when I installed my usual attachment_fu plugin failed. So I started googling it and although I did manage to find a rails3 version there seemed to be a lot more people talking about paperclip with rails3.
So firstly what are the advantages of paperclip?
Is there better support for rails3 with it?
Neither. Use carrierwave .
To handle the file uploads, I’ve switched from Paperclip to CarrierWave. While Paperclip has (and continues) to serve me well in many applications I work with, I really appreciate the modular approach that CarrierWave takes. It’s agnostic as to which of the popular S3 clients you use, supporting both aws/s3 and right_aws. It’s also ORM agnostic and not tightly coupled to Active Record. The tight coupling of Paperclip has caused us some grief at work, and I’m also confused about the state of Paperclip’s support for aws/s3 and right_aws. So, I was happy to find this new project, and the maintainer Jonas Nicklas seems to be an extremely responsive and helpful dude, which is always good thing. The code looks great, and I’ve had an easy time working with this library so far. (from: http://trevorturk.com/2010/2/8/kzak-an-open-source-web-based-jukebox/)
More info here:
http://techblog.moviepilot.com/carrierwave-as-a-replacement-for-paperclip
I made attachment_fu rails3 compatible.
See https://github.com/mihael/attachment_fu
EDIT: but it is broken for some users, and i am not maintaining it further, so please look into other solutions, if you do not want to hack it yourself ;)
I tested paperclip vs carrierwave vs attachment_fu with rails3.0.3 for a project I am working on.
So far attachment_fu works very well as always, but the code still needs some refactoring with the callback system. It has backends for cloudfiles, s3.
Paperclip is also very good and is very easy to use. The basic setup did not let me upload movies (had to add option :whiny=>false), and it did not sanitize filenames the way I expected. This is how I did it:
class Asset < ActiveRecord::Base
has_attached_file :file, :styles => { :small => "300x300>", :thumb => "50x50>" }, :whiny => false
before_create :sanitize_file_name
private
def sanitize_file_name
self.file.instance_write( :file_name, file_file_name.gsub(/[^A-Za-z0-9\.\-]/, '_'))
end
end
Paperclip has s3 backend, but does not have a backend for cloudfiles built-in. There is a paperclip fork for that (google for paperclip-cloudfiles) which is built for rails2.3.5 (search github for paperclip_demo).
Carrierwave looks very nice, with the decoupled architecture, but I do not like the fact that it does not delete stuff on updates and destroys of objects, leaving a bunch of files and directories on disk. The basic carrierwave setup also did not let me upload movies, although it sanitizes filenames nicely. I did not found a quick fix for this, yet. If You are using Mongoid and GridFS, carrierwave has built in support.
Finally, I took Paperclip for my project.
I've created a gem for attachment_fu if you want to continue using it in Rails 3.2 and beyond.
https://rubygems.org/gems/pothoven-attachment_fu
Dragonfly is really good. Try it out, it can handle files and images.