Directory Conventions for Rack Middleware RubyGems

May 13th, 2010 by

I just wanted to make a quick note about directory conventions for rack middleware gems. For all gems you should follow the convention of housing all of your code inside a single file and directory of the same name as your gem within lib, e.g.


$> ls -l ~/projects/timecop/lib
drwxr-xr-x 5 john staff 170 Jan 14 20:31 timecop
-rw-r--r-- 1 john staff 82 Jan 14 20:31 timecop.rb

The reason for this is related to how RubyGems hijacks Ruby’s require method. When a gem is activated its lib/ folder is added to the load path. This means that anything inside that directory is now accessible via the require method. In order to avoid file naming collisions across gems, you must name these exactly the same as your gem. (see slides for I Don’t Trust Your Code for a more complete discussions of this)

However, this is slightly different with rack gems. The convention for naming rack middleware is by using a dash, e.g. rack-rewrite. The convention for requiring rack middleware though is to replace that dash with a slash, e.g. require 'rack/rewrite'.

The convention I’ve adopted for structuring rack middleware within a gem is to include a file by the same name as the gem and a rack directory in lib/, and then to include the second part of the middleware name as a subdirectory under that.


~/projects/rack-rewrite (master) $> ls -l lib/
total 8
drwxr-xr-x 4 john staff 136 Apr 17 18:02 rack
-rw-r--r--@ 1 john staff 22 Apr 17 18:02 rack-rewrite.rb

~/projects/rack-rewrite (master) $> ls -l lib/rack
total 8
drwxr-xr-x 3 john staff 102 May 13 11:09 rewrite
-rw-r--r--@ 1 john staff 827 Apr 17 18:02 rewrite.rb

This allows my users to use either require 'rack-rewrite' or require 'rack/rewrite'.

Rack::Rewrite 1.0.0 Released

May 13th, 2010 by

Rack::Rewrite 1.0.0 has just been released. To install simply run: gem install rack-rewrite.

Rack::Rewrite is a web-server agnostic rack middleware for defining and applying rewrite rules. In many cases you can get away with Rack::Rewrite instead of writing Apache mod_rewrite rules.

Documentation is hosted at RubyForge. The source code is hosted at GitHub.

Updates include:

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Rack::Rewrite 0.2.1 Released

January 6th, 2010 by

Rack::Rewrite 0.2.1 has just been released. To install simply run: gem install rack-rewrite.

Rack::Rewrite is a web-server agnostic rack middleware for defining and applying rewrite rules. In many cases you can get away with Rack::Rewrite instead of writing Apache mod_rewrite rules.

Documentation is hosted at RubyForge. The source code is hosted at GitHub.

Updates include:

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Timecop 0.3.4 Released

December 7th, 2009 by

Timecop 0.3.4 has just been released. To install simply run: gem install timecop.

Timecop is a RubyGem providing “time travel” and “time freezing” capabilities, making it dead simple to test time-dependent code. It provides a unified method to mock Time.now, Date.today, and DateTime.now in a single call.

Documentation is hosted at RubyForge. The source code is hosted at GitHub.

Updates include:

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Rack::Rewrite + Google Analytics Makes Site Transitions Seamless

November 24th, 2009 by

At SmartLogic we recently rebuilt our website in rails. The previous version was a MediaWiki installation with a ton of content that had garnered a decent bit of Google juice that we did not want to lose. By setting up 301 permanent redirects for the old URL’s, we can hold onto that juice.

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Rack::Rewrite for Site Maintenance and Downtime

November 16th, 2009 by

Rack::Rewrite is a Rack middleware for defining and applying rewrite rules. Though it’s not a full replacement for Apache’s mod_rewrite, a great deal of rules I’ve previously written in Apache config files can be replaced by Rack::Rewrite. Run gem install rack-rewrite to install the gem.

I typically leverage rewrite rules to take my sites offline for maintenance. Most capistrano users will be familiar with the following Apache rewrite ruleset.
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Timecop 0.3.0 Released

September 20th, 2009 by

Timecop 0.3.0 has just been released. To install simply run: gem install timecop.

Timecop is a RubyGem providing “time travel” and “time freezing” capabilities, making it dead simple to test time-dependent code. It provides a unified method to mock Time.now, Date.today, and DateTime.now in a single call.

Documentation is on RubyForge. The source code is hosted at GitHub.

Updates include:

API

  • Completely remove Timecop#unset_all (deprecated by Timecop#return in 0.2.0)
  • Return Time.now from #freeze, #travel and #return — code contributed by Keith Bennett (keithrbennett)

Maintenance

  • Fix bug that left Time#mock_time set in some instances
  • Upped build dependency to jeweler ~> 1.2.1
  • Don’t pollute top-level namespace with classes/constants

Documentation

  • Clearer examples in the README, better description in the gemspec
  • Improve RDoc

Shell Script to Upgrade Ruby Enterprise Edition while Maintaining Directory Naming Sanity

June 10th, 2009 by

As you’re likely already aware, a denial of service (DoS) vulnerability in Ruby’s BigDecimal library was uncovered, fixed and reported on June 9, 2009. Patching options include:

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Including external .rake files in your project’s Rakefile — keep your rake tasks organized!

May 26th, 2009 by

Perhaps you have a non-Rails project (let’s say it’s in ruby and maybe some other languages, too) and you use Rake tasks to automate some of the dirty work. So you’ve got a bunch of methods that you wish to keep neatly sorted into .rake files in some dir’s (probably a sub folder of lib like lib/tasks) and a single Rakefile in your project’s root directory. Including those external .rake files in your project’s Rakefile via require statements won’t work :

require 'lib/some_rake_file' # or require 'lib/some_rake_file.rake'

=> rake aborted!
no such file to load — /home/your_project/lib/some_rake_file

Rake assumes the ‘require’d files end in .rb, so it won’t find your .rake files. You need to import rake files:

import 'lib/some_rake_file'

This is fine for individual files, but I wanted to include all files that end in .rake in my tasks dir:

Dir.glob('tasks/*.rake').each { |r| import r }

…and there you go. While dead simple, this exemplifies an important distinction between require and import that I found to be poorly documented. Keep your rake tasks organized and remember that Rake isn’t just for rails apps!

Find the Unique Sessions for a Rails Application

May 4th, 2009 by

Today we’re going to look at how to find the number of unique sessions over a specific time frame for a rails application. We’ll be using the slow-actions gem.

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