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:

API

• Fix rack 1.1.0 / rails3 compatibility by eliminating reliance on REQUEST_URI env param. Paths are now constructed with PATH_INFO and QUERY_STRING
• Follow rack directory/require convention: require ‘rack/rewrite’ instead of ‘rack-rewrite’
• Include an HTML anchor tag linked to where the URL being redirected to in the body of 301′s and 302′s

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:

API

• Implement $& substitution pattern (thanks to Ben Brinckerhoff)

Maintenance

• Ignore empty captures instead of failing during subsitution (thanks to Ben Brinckerhoff)
• Play nice with Rack::Test requests which only set PATH_INFO and not REQUEST_URI (thanks to @docunext)
• Use QUERY_STRING instead of QUERYSTRING as per Rack spec. Closes Issue #1.

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:

Maintenance

• Fix various timezone-related issues. Notably, when traveling to a DateTime
  instance specified in a non-local timezone, convert provided DateTime
  instance to a local instance and return that from DateTime.now.
  Code contributed by Michaël Witrant [piglop]
• Fix bug that would not allow Timecop to be used when Ruby’s ‘date’
  library had not been previously loaded.
  Code contributed by Tuomas Kareinen [tuomas]
• Fix bug when traveling to a DateTime across a DST boundary that
  resulted in DateTime’s being off by an hour.
• Migrate argument parsing into Timecop::TimeStackItem to reduce the
  responsibility of the Timecop class.

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

  RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !\.(css|jpg|png)$
  RewriteCond %{DOCUMENT_ROOT}/system/maintenance.html -f
  RewriteCond %{SCRIPT_FILENAME} !maintenance.html
  RewriteRule ^.*$ /system/maintenance.html [L]

This ruleset matches requests for non-asset URL’s and renders a maintenance page if it exists on the filesystem. When capistrano users run cap deploy:web:disable REASON="site upgrade" UNTIL="2PM" a maintenance page is placed in public/system and this ruleset begins to kick in. Running cap deploy:web:enable will remove this page and the ruleset ceases to match.

We can replace this ruleset with the following Rack::Rewrite rule:

  # Ruby 1.8.x
  maintenance_file = File.join(RAILS_ROOT, 'public', 'system', 'maintenance.html')
  send_file /.*/, maintenance_file, :if => Proc.new { |rack_env|
    File.exists?(maintenance_file) && rack_env['REQUEST_URI'] !~ /\.(css|jpg|png)/
  }

This rewrite rule uses the send_file method to return the maintenance page, uses a rule guard (the :if proc) to check for the existence of the file, and accesses the rack environment directly (rack_env arg to the Proc) to check the request URI. Due to the shortcomings of the Ruby 1.8′s regular expression library (no negative lookahead), we have to leverage the rule guard to allow assets to continue to be served (css, jpg, png).

Using Ruby 1.9, this rule is simpler.

  # Ruby 1.9.x
  maintenance_file = File.join(RAILS_ROOT, 'public', 'system', 'maintenance.html')
  send_file /(.*)$(?<!css|png|jpg)/, maintenance_file, :if => Proc.new { |rack_env|
    File.exists?(maintenance_file)
  }

Users of 1.8.x can leverage Oniguruma to keep the rule simpler.

  # Ruby 1.8.x + Oniguruma
  maintenance_file = File.join(RAILS_ROOT, 'public', 'system', 'maintenance.html')
  send_file Oniguruma::ORegexp.new("(.*)$(?<!css|png|jpg)"), maintenance_file, :if => Proc.new { |rack_env|
    File.exists?(maintenance_file)
  }

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

  sudo gem install environmentalist

The only substantial change in this release is that we moved the loading of postboot.rb to the bottom of the boot.rb file as opposed to the top of config/environment.rb. This was necessary because common db rake tasks like db:create and db:drop stopped loading the environment in 2.3.2.

As a recap, environmentalist provides an executable that converts a rails app’s config structure. The basic idea is that environments themselves are now first-class citizens, allowing you to create several environments (e.g. staging, prodtest, demo, etc.) in a clean, organized fashion. Each environment is given its own folder where it can store its own set of configuration files (think mongrel configs, apache configs, etc.) without polluting the top-level config/ directory.

The primary feature added was the distinction between “freezing” and “rebasing” time. In 0.1.0, Timecop.travel would actually freeze time. This is no longer the case. Rather, a time offset will be calculated, and a running clock is simulated by always offsetting the time returned by Time.now (and friends) by the original offset.

(Note that time can still be frozen with Timecop.freeze.)

To update a previous version:

sudo gem update timecop

To install for the first time:

sudo gem install timecop

The new feature set allows us to avoid the following common pitfalls that were present in 0.1.0.

1. In rails, if you had set up a time mock in the development environment, then every time you invoked script/generate migration (and others), the generator would read your mocked instance of Time.now, and use that date for the migration name.
2. Any benchmarking/timing code executed within the yielded block would always return times of 0 seconds. This was due to time being frozen.

The other major change to the API was the deprecating of Timecop.unset_all in favor or Timecop.return.

This update also vastly improves the rdoc, making the public API much more accessible. The Timecop class has particularly thorough documentation.

For a more complete description of the gem, please refer to the introductory blog post.