Lancelot Carlson

It's not too often these days that you hear BIG announcements for rails. I was excited to hear however that the latest version of rails is getting some cool new features and is getting some press. Courtenay posted an informative blog post detailing the changes:

http://blog.caboo.se/articles/2008/3/30/exciting-times-in-rails-land

I've been wanting to solve this problem for awhile now, and it seems like solving this problem is a simple thing, but will require some good old open source programming. At the moment the only solution I can find for getting subversion to work with nginx is to proxy subversion requests through nginx to apache (or use apache directly if that is the sole purpose of your machine). The solution is well documented even posted up on the trac wiki (http://trac.edgewall.org/wiki/TracNginxRecipe) but wouldn't it be nice to be able to use nginx directly? I found a post on the ruby forums regarding this and it looks like someone might be working on it sometime soon (http://www.ruby-forum.com/topic/140841). Is anyone working on this and if so where can I get some more information?

I filed a ticket awhile ago to the rubygems project regarding what I consider a bug to the way it lets you require files. Here is what my ticket said:

======

When two different projects have a file with the same name inside of it, and you try to use require, you can get some
funky results. I'm not sure there is a solution for this, but it can get pretty frustrating when you realize it's requiring
the wrong file. Example:

I have two gems, anvil and rails. Anvil defines an initializer.rb inside of lib. Rails defines an initializer.rb inside
of lib. Now if I run require 'initializer', it picks anvil first because it is higher in the alphabet. The same I believe
applies to the gem command, but I haven't thoroughly tested that. Here were the results of my irb prompt prior
to uninstalling anvil (now I'm going to have to refactor anvil not to have an initializer.rb):

Macintosh-5:rails-2.0.2 lance$ irb
>> require 'rubygems'
=> false
>> require 'initializer'
=> true
>> Rails
NameError: uninitialized constant Rails
from (irb):3

After uninstalling anvil:

Macintosh-5:lancelot lance$ irb
>> require 'rubygems'
=> false
>> require 'initializer'
=> true
>> Rails

Thoughts?

======

Today I got a response saying that this was not a rubygems bug and that Anvil and Rails should duke it out? IMO, this not the expected behavior I had for requiring files, am I the only one in the same boat? I know I haven't submitted a patch for this, but at least keep this ticket open so I can file a patch eventually or maybe comment on the ticket encouraging me or someone else to write a patch for this!

Anyone else think this should be fixed?

Here is the ticket:

http://rubyforge.org/tracker/?func=detail&atid=575&aid=18890&group_id=126

Something that comes up at work often is the fact that nginx is missing a configuration in the location block of the SSL server block. The problem is that rails needs https headers to be sent directly to it in order to recognize it's an ssl request. Here is the configuration you need:

location / {
proxy_set_header X_FORWARDED_PROTO https;
}

This is more of a note to self than anything. If someone could provide more detail on this issue, that would be great! :)

Finally, after having some free time this weekend, I was able to deploy my new blog that I created from scratch on my Engine Yard slice. The layout is still a little sketchy and simple, but I will be working on improving it over time. Stay tuned for updates as I attempt to post something useful.