Throughout the last couple of days, I did a bigger refactoring of our Ruby on Rails application. As I changed quite a few moving parts, I covered everything I did with RSpec. It's really an incredible feeling to have all your bases covered with automated tests when you finally start the manual regression test. Along … Continue reading RSpec Tips & Tricks
Category: Tools & Technology
Tailoring Your Munin Installation
After following Dan's tutorial on installing munin on your servers, you already get the benefits of munin's default plugins. You have graphs showing your CPU, RAM, I/O, as well as MySQL, Exim, and quite some other stats. But most of the time you run some additional software which you also want to montior. Install Some … Continue reading Tailoring Your Munin Installation
Sprinkle – Automated Infrastructure for the Rest of us
Automatically setting up and maintaining my servers is a must for me. Only if everything I install and configure on a server is scripted I'm sure I know what's there and that it stays that way. Having automated infrastructure enables me to schedule a critical setup change at 3 am and be on the safe … Continue reading Sprinkle – Automated Infrastructure for the Rest of us
Deploying with Capistrano
At the end of April, I wrote about how automatic rsyncs were making my operations life a living hell. Enter Summer, vacation, new developer and here we are mid-September before I finally get around to permanently fixing this problem. But, I can't really blame all of it on life - after Matthias gave me a … Continue reading Deploying with Capistrano
Migrating to Google Custom Search
"Do what you do best, and link to the rest." - Jeff Jarvis Our search has been suffering for the past year. Decreased usage and miserable performance had combined to make it a wasteland of vain suppositions which alienated our users. Enter Google Custom Search. The Users Have Spoken (and we're listening) We were averaging … Continue reading Migrating to Google Custom Search
Optimizing Site Performance: Cookieless Domains
We all like eating cookies, but only so many. Some websites, though, force too many down our throat and I have to say mine was one of those guilty ones. Google's Page Speed tool (and site) gives you an incredible amount of website optimization info. Analyzing my page's performance showed that all the static content … Continue reading Optimizing Site Performance: Cookieless Domains
Real World Example: Using factory_girl to simplify our test setup
When you do integration testing in a ruby on rails application, you don't want to stub out all involved models. Rails' built in approach of using fixtures is considered to be sub-optimal and the way to go today is to use factories. Homegrown Factories In our application we used to write our own factories, one … Continue reading Real World Example: Using factory_girl to simplify our test setup
Aegis: Role-based Permissions for your Ruby on Rails application
This is a guest post by our friends over at makandra, a cool Ruby on Rails development shop. Today they announce a great new Ruby gem for dealing with role-based permissions. You know the game! Each time you start a new application the same procedure starts over again: You set up your tools like git, … Continue reading Aegis: Role-based Permissions for your Ruby on Rails application
Monitoring OpenSolaris Zones with Nagios
We're running separate zones for web, app, and db servers. To be able to know the health of our application and our servers, we rely on pnp4nagios for graphing performance data like CPU utilization, memory usage, etc. Using OpenSolaris zones, there is only one OS kernel running. This is different in e.g. XEN, where every … Continue reading Monitoring OpenSolaris Zones with Nagios
Setting up a test database on a ruby on rails continuous integration server using SQL instead of schema.rb
For developing our Ruby on Rails based web site, we usually take regular SQL dumps from our production servers (of course, anonymizing sensitive customer data along the way). Always having a fresh dump allows us to be on the safe side when writing database migrations. Having an up to date development database enables us to … Continue reading Setting up a test database on a ruby on rails continuous integration server using SQL instead of schema.rb
