I have been searching all day for a way to use cache manifest in rails 3.1 but everything keeps pointing to rack-offline, which I don't want to use. How do I use this feature without rack-offline?
Thanks
Related
In my company they tend to ask some extremly weird features, they want me to load dynamic language files, is there a way to solve this issue without having to rewrite the whole Messages provider of play framework, and instead use some files stored somewhere on the server to handle internationalization?
this could save me a month of work because i've already wrote a huge application (been working on it for a year now) and they want to make all the labels customizable by client.
any help, or any suggestions?
i'm using play framework latest version.
Sadly there is not really much customization options in the Messages API. One idea that might work is to subclass MessagesPlugin with a custom implementation of the api method and provide strings from the database there and then register that as a plugin in your app.
I'd like to speed up my site's loading time in part by ensuring all CSS/JS is being cached by the browser, as recommend by Google's PageSpeed tool. But I'd like to ensure that visitors have the latest CSS/JS files, if they are updated and the cache now contains old code.
From my research so far, appending something like "?459454" to the end of the CSS/JS url is popular. But wouldn't that force the visitor's browser to re-download the CSS/JS file every time?
Is there a way to set the files to be cached by the browser, but ensure the browser knows about updated versions of the cached files?
If you're using Apache, you can use mod_pagespeed (mentioned earlier by symcbean) to do this automatically.
It would work best if you also use the ModPagespeedLoadFromFile directive since that will create a new URL as soon as it detects that the resource has changed on disk, however it will work fine without that (it will use the cache expiry time returned when it fetches the resource to rewrite it).
If you're using nginx, you could use ngx_pagespeed.
If you're using IIS, you could use IISpeed, which is not a Google product and I don't know it's full feature set.
Version numbers will work, but you can also append a hash of the file to the filename with your web framework or asset build script:
<script src="script-5054a101c8b164cbfa570d97fe23cc0d.js"></script>
That way, once your HTML changes to reflect this new version, browsers will just download and cache the updated version of your script.
As you say, append a query string to the URL of the asset, but only change it if the content is different, or change it when you deploy a new version.
appending something like "?459454" to the end of the CSS/JS url is popular. But wouldn't that force the visitor's browser to re-download the CSS/JS file every time?
No it won't force them to download each time, however there are a lot of intermediate proxies out there which ignore query strings on cacheable content - hence many tools (including mod_pagespeed which does automatic url rewriting based on file conents, and content merging on the fly along with lots of other cool tricks) move the version information into the path / filename.
If you've only got .htaccess type access then you can strip the version information out to map direct to a file, or use a scripted 404 redirector (but this is probably only a good idea if you're behind a caching reverse proxy).
I have a lot of experience with YUI2 and I'm getting up to speed on YUI3. The service I'm writing needs HTTPS, but the vanilla YUI experience loads from Yahoo's HTTP-only CDN, which quietly fails in Chrome and loudly fails in modern IE when the browser tries to mix an HTTPS page with HTTP javascript.
My goals are to get all of:
Site uses HTTPS
YUI works in Chrome & IE (so scripts also must be delivered over SSL)
Uses a modern version of YUI 3 (this disqualifies YUI PHP Loader which hasn't been updated to support even YUI 3.4, while 3.8 is "current")
Use roll up combos for speed instead of many JS and CSS files (this disqualifies Google's CDN... if YUI 3 is actually hosted there which I couldn't find.)
Site dynamically loads YUI dependencies (dependencies change regularly as I add functionality, going back to the configurator and saving a new bundle every time is a PITA)
The obvious solution appears to be to give up goal #5 and just self-host combos.
How can I meet all 5 goals?
The easiest way to solve it is to change base URL from
http://yui.yahooapis.com/ to
https://yui-s.yahooapis.com/
Depending upon your server environment, you have a couple of options.
Development
Download the latest YUI library, and upload the yui/build/ folder to your server. The seed file should work fine without modification, though you won't be able to take advantage of combo loading.
Production
Use the YUI Configurator to determine all the files that you will need for each module set, and download them manually from the combo links provided. Rename them to something suitable like yui3.8.0-node-rollup.js and serve these to your users.
Be advised that if you use different module sets for different scripts, you may need to make multiple sets of files from this process, depending upon how you set it up. There is also a question here about concatenating Javascript together, if you are curious.
As an addendum, in my past research, I discovered that pulling external libraries over a secure connection may not be a safe idea.
I am currently working on a rails 3.1 app that is going to be in the wild soon. I need to add captcha's to a couple of the pages (reset password etc). I think I have decided to go with recaptcha's service but I'm stuck trying to decide which gem to use. The two obvious options are:
ambethia / recaptcha: https://github.com/ambethia/recaptcha
and
rack-recapcha https://github.com/achiu/rack-recaptcha
Does anyone have any experience / suggestions as to which works better with rails 3.1?
I'm succesfully using ambethia/recaptcha.
The main thing is neither of them are using the asset pipeline from rails 3.1.
Anyhow ambethia/recaptcha. works fine.
I need an easy way to generate static web pages so that I can serve them up with Apache or Nginx. Currently I am using SproutCore's build tool (Abbot) to generate static pages but that is a little bit cumbersome as it is designed for building SproutCore apps, not non-SproutCore HTML pages.
Here are my requirements:
Javascript must be combined and minified
CSS files must be combined
Each image / CSS / Javascript asset must have unique URL for better caching (query string isn't enough)
Asset URL should be different only when it really changes
Localization support thorough HTML, CSS, Javascript and image files
Nice template engine with layouts, partials etc.
Here are possible solutions I have found:
Create the site using Ruby on Rails, then get all resources using wget like http://usefulfor.com/ruby/2009/03/23/use-rails-to-create-a-static-site-rake-and-subversion/
Use Middleman: http://middlemanapp.com
Any thoughts on this?
After a longish evaluation process I have decided to use Middleman. It does the trick and I love its simplicity and the fact that I can use existing Rack components with it.
Best Regards,
Pekka Mattila
I'm the creator of Middleman and would be eager to help you get comfortable using Middleman. My main goal is to give users the power of Rails, but focused on static development. Some of the actual code of Middleman is simplified versions of Ab
Here's what I do:
Ruby on Rails 3 with the High Voltage Gem, which makes it easy
to serve a static page body using the common templates. It requires a
simple entry in the routes (and you can use namespaces to create a
hierarchy).
Apache reverse proxy to stand-alone Passenger (which uses nginx I
believe) to run the Rails app. This article describes how to
configure it.
Stand-alone passenger will read the URL, see if there is a corresponding file in /public with the .html on it, and serve that. If not found, it will invoke Rails and generate the page. In essence, page caching, with the option of publishing your URLs with or without the .html. There is a section in the Passenger docs about page caching specifically.
As far as combining and minifying js and css, here's a good stackoverflow thread.
Rails has excellent i18n/l10n support.
Rails template engine is very nice to work with. And you can use HAML if you prefer.
For your 3rd and 4th points, I'm a little confused. You want css and js combined, but then you want each to have it's own URL. In Rails, the "cache => true" directive on asset tags takes care of adding a query string parameter that changes when the content does, which is a fairly traditional scheme. I'm not sure what context you are working in where that would not work. Any CDN I've ever used works fine with that, as does an web server implementing the HTTP spec correctly. Anyway, changing the actual path or file in the URL would require changing all references to it. Maybe I'm misunderstanding?
Monkeyman has the template engine you need, I think. Think of it as Middleman's little Scala brother. Nowhere as mature or feature rich yet, but we'll get there eventually. The current incarnation supports HAML, Jade, SSP for layouts, Markdown for content and a couple of other things.
Without any special order
jekyll - quite simple
middleman - a lot of funcionalities
nanoc - a lot of funcionalities
stasis - use controllers
staticmatic
frank
gumdrop
ruby on rails + wget
ruby on rails + high voltage + apache reverse proxy
You should probably also checkout mod_pagespeed. It will at least give you this:
Javascript must be combined and minified
CSS files must be combined
Each image / CSS / Javascript asset must have unique URL for better caching (query string isn't enough)
Asset URL should be different only when it really changes
It won't give you this:
Localization support thorough HTML, CSS, Javascript and image files
Nice template engine with layouts, partials etc.
You can have a look at docpad. It's written in coffeescript and runs on Nodejs. It is document based, where you write some documents and layouts, it will compile them and write them in the out directory. You can write documents in a lot of languages via plugins
It also supports multiple level of file compilation. For example from eco to markdown to html.
Another great feature of it is that you can query on other documents being generated in a document. For example in the first page, you have something like this to get all blog posts:
database.findAll({url : /posts/})
Which will return all documents having posts in their url.