will_paginate gem

While upgrading an old project to Rails 2.0.2 (and having trouble getting the will_paginate plugin to install), I discovered that there is a will_paginate gem:

http://mislav.caboo.se/rails/will_paginate-love/

Railscasts - will_paginate

Ruby Gem - Highline

I was looking for a way to prompt a user for input on the console and ran across the RubyGem HighLine. It does a lot more than this, but here's how to capture STDIN from the console:

#!/usr/local/bin/ruby
require 'rubygems'
require 'highline/import'

username = ask("Enter your username:  ") { |q| q.echo = true }
password = ask("Enter your password:  ") { |q| q.echo = "*" }

Here's the output on the console:

$ ruby highline.rb 
Enter your username:  doug
Enter your password:  ******

Get it here:

HighLine

or simply install the gem the normal way:

$ sudo gem install highline

Upgrading to specific version of Rails

sudo gem install -v=2.0.1 rails --include-dependencies

Viewing Ruby Gem documentation

1) Command line

$ ri <gem_name>

2) Browser (http://localhost:8808)

$ gem_server

Ruby on Rails/Mongrel/Ubuntu

I've been using Ubuntu lately and decided to install Ruby on Rails and Mongrel.

$ sudo apt-get install ruby irb rdoc

Or download the source for the latest version (apt-get installs 1.8.4, but the latest source is 1.8.6):

$ tar zxvf ruby-1.8.6.tar.gz
$ cd ruby-1.8.6
$ ./configure 
$ make
$ sudo make install

Once ruby is installed, I typically use Gems if I can.

Download the latest Gems at http://rubyforge.org/frs/?group_id=126 (0.9.4 in this case) and then:

$ tar xzvf rubygems-0.9.4.tgz
$ cd rubygems-0.9.4
$ sudo ruby setup.rb

Install Rails:

sudo gem install rails --include-dependencies

Install Mongrel and Mongrel cluster gem plugin:

sudo gem install mongrel --include-dependencies
sudo gem install mongrel_cluster

Install Apache 2.2

$ tar zxvf httpd-2.2.4.tar.gz
$ cd httpd-2.2.4
$ ./configure \
  --prefix=/usr/local/apache \
  --enable-rewrite \
  --enable-headers \
  --enable-ssl \  
  --enable-proxy \ 
  --with-mpm=prefork
$ make
$ sudo make install

I got this error when running configure:

Configuring Apache Portable Runtime Utility library...

checking for APR-util... yes
configure: error: Cannot use an external APR-util with the bundled APR
make: *** [apache] Error 1

Adding this option fixed the problem:

--with-included-apr 

Running Apache with a single Mongrel Instance

$ mongrel_rails start -p 8000 -e production -d

Add to apache conf (httpd.connf)

ServerName hostname.com
ServerAlias www.hostname.com

ProxyPass / http://www.hostname.com:8000/
ProxyPassReverse / http://www.hostname.com:8000/
ProxyPreserveHost on

Restart Apache and it will forward requests for www.hostname.com on port 80 to Mongrel server running on port 8000.