Well, I just updated to Fedora 15, and along with it comes Rails 3.0.5, so I find myself in the midst of transitioning my two rails apps to Rails 3.0.5

I had hoped to be able to use yum (fedora RPM's) to keep my rails stuff updates, but that just does not seem possible. I have to use gem to install some things. This actually seems to work out, but it makes me nervous.

There is the issue that yum updates will update rails and as API changes happen, my apps will break. It might be wiser to freeze my applications to depend on specific rails versions. In the old days, you did this by setting the variable RAILS_GEM_VERSION in config/environment.rb. I don't have a clue how to do this with rails 3.0.

Here are some handy links:

• Getting Started with Rails
• Upgrading from Rails 2 to 3

Converting the project

cd /u1/rails
mv myapp myapp.2.x
rails new myapp

Then I tackled things like so:

• Merge info from config/database.yml (I use mysql).
  This is easy, and a verbatim copy would be fine.
• Look at config/environment.rb, I used to have to set up a session_key and secret for cookie style session management, but this seems to have gone away.
  Actually nothing to do here.
• Look at routes.rb, holy mackerel, this is totally new and changed.
  See below.
• Forget about mongrel_cluster.yml, I'll be using passenger, not needed.
• Copy everything in app over.
• Delete public/index.rhtml

Without tackling the routing issues, I can't resist just trying:

rails server

The details on installing the mysql2 gem are in my notes on Fedora 15 and rails. After doing this, my application tries to start. There are two things to do to get rails to route to my application instead of the generic welcome:

• Delete public/index.html
• Edit config/routes.rb to specify the root route (this is all different now).

map.connect '', :controller => "login", :action => 'login'

map.connect ':controller/:action/:id'

In the new route.rb, the root route (what a phrase!) is specified by:

root :to => "login#login"

More is required to get the application running. I uncomment the following "non-restful" route that I am warned about and my application takes off.

match ':controller(/:action(/:id(.:format)))'

Mongrel bites the ... dust

in `require': no such file to load -- dispatcher (LoadError)

This is the rails deployment issue that I have confronted so many times in the past when the deployment scheme de jour changes. The present fashion allows a choice between "passenger" and "unicorn". Well, I have always said that deployment is the achilles heel of rails applications. Here we go again. Neither of these is available as RPM packages for fedora.

In a nutshell, passenger is custom made to work with apache and looks like the ideal route for me given that I have an extremely low traffic site. Unicorn along with Nginx is admired by the rails developers and would be recommended for a high traffic (a thousand hits per second) site.

Onward with passenger

API changes and my applications

Apparently this was deprecated (and is still available via a plugin, but after reading the reasons, I am OK with doing away with it). The following code is an outline of one persons replacement:

# add this to app/helpers/application_helper.rb
  def errors_for(object, message=nil)
    html = ""
    unless object.errors.blank?
      html << "<div class='formErrors #{object.class.name.humanize.downcase}Errors'>\n"
      if message.blank?
        if object.new_record?
          html << "\t\t<h5>There was a problem creating the #{object.class.name.humanize.downcase}</h5>\n"
        else
          html << "\t\t<h5>There was a problem updating the #{object.class.name.humanize.downcase}</h5>\n"
        end    
      else
        html << "<h5>#{message}</h5>"
      end  
      html << "\t\t<ul>\n"
      object.errors.full_messages.each do |error|
        html << "\t\t\t<li>#{error}</li>\n"
      end
      html << "\t\t</ul>\n"
      html << "\t</div>\n"
    end
    html
  end  

will_paginate

gem install will_paginate
Fetching: will_paginate-2.3.15.gem

Here is what I did. I added the following line to /u1/rails/myapp/Gemfile

gem "will_paginate", "~> 3.0.pre2"

cd /u1/rails/myapp
bundle install

Installing will_paginate (3.0.pre2)

namespace 'views' do
  desc 'Renames all your rhtml views to erb'
    task 'rename' do
      Dir.glob('app/views/**/*.rhtml').each do |file|
	puts `svn mv #{file} #{file.gsub(/\.rhtml$/, '.erb')}`
      end
  end
end