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.
Related
I got a ubuntu machine and im tryying to create a simple view with ruby.Im well familiar with rails but i wanted to a simple standalone(if possible) like a php one with ruby.I got apache2 installed on my machine.I also got nginx and passenger.
The file i want to create is a simple 3+2= <%= 3+2 %>.Any clues?
Look into using sinatra for simpler implementations. It runs as a webserver as well but is much more lightweight than rails, and has erb support. Remember, erb is a library and not a native ruby feature, so you need a way to compile the view to include the ruby variables.
Its also possible to write your own webserver logic using Rack, and hook into erb to render the view, but thats probably more work than you want to do. With sinatra, rendering an erb is as simple as:
require 'sinatra'
get '/' do
erb :index
end
(If you had a file in a views/ directory named index.erb)
Ruby comes with the erb executable.
You can compile the file to HTML with the following shell command
erb input.html.erb > output.html
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
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.
I've Rails 3.1 application which generates some images in 'public/scene/ticket_123/*.png' on fly. It works normally in development mode, but in production all assets should be precompiled. So I can't use files that I've generated after application started.
Setting config.assets.compile = true hasn't solve my problem. Situation is only worse since ticket number changes - so images are in different directories which are continiously created on fly too.
How should I setup assets to be able to show images that're created after an application was started?
I had the same problem. I only found a work around by copying all my images into "public/images" and changed all the links to the new path.
That worked for me for the moment. I wait until somebody comes up with a better idea.
I hope that helps.
If found solution.
# In view I wrote
<img src=<%= mycontroller_image_get_path :filename=>file_name %> >
# In controller I created GET action
def image_get
send_file params[:filename], :disposition => 'inline', :type => 'image/png'
end
But you should care that file you're trying to send is in "#{Rails.root}/public" directory otherwise send_file says it can't found the file. (May be it is not necessary in /public but in Rails.root anyway). To change this behavior it can be useful to read this topic Can I use send_file to send a file on a drive other than the Rails.root drive?
My Rails 3.1 app is using PDFkit to render specific pages, and I'm running into (what seems like) a common problem with where trying to generate the pdf is causing the process to hang.
I found this solution here on stackoverflow: rails 3 and PDFkit. Where I add a config.threadsafe! entry in my development.rb file and this works BUT it requires that for every change anywhere in the app I have to stop and restart my server to see my changes. NOT acceptable from a workflow - I'm currently setting up the styling for the PDF pages, and it's painfully slow process having to do this.
I also found the same issue reported here: https://github.com/jdpace/PDFKit/issues/110, and the issue points to this workaround: http://jguimont.com/post/2627758108/pdfkit-and-its-middleware-on-heroku.
ActionController::Base.asset_host = Proc.new { |source, request|
if request.env["REQUEST_PATH"].include? ".pdf"
"file://#{Rails.root.join('public')}"
else
"#{request.protocol}#{request.host_with_port}"
end
}
This removes the need to restart the change, BUT now when I load the pdf it's without the styles rendered from the asset pipeline because it's taking the assets from the public directory. I think I could work with this solution if I could know how to create the stylesheets for the pdf templates in the public folder. IS anyone developing with PDFKit and Rails3.1 where this is all working in sync?
Any help would be greatly appreciated!
Thanks!
Tony
Here is the setup I am using:
I run a second instance of rails server with rails server -p 3001 -e test which will handle my assets for the PDF. The server will print the assets requests as they come in, so I can check that everything works as expected.
I use the following asset_host in my config/environments/development file:
config.action_controller.asset_host = ->(source, request = nil){
"http://localhost:3001" if request && request.env['REQUEST_PATH'].include?(".pdf")
}
If you are using Pow, you can use multiple workers. Add this to your ~/.powconfig
export POW_WORKERS=3
(taken from Pow manual)
There's a problem with pdfkit in Rails 3.1. See my answer to this related question:
pdfkit does not style pdfs