Month: March 2009

Installing Rails & MySQL On Mac OS X

First, isntall MySQL package installer from

http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/mysql/5.1.html#downloads

DON’T DOWNLOAD THE 64-BIT VERSION!!!
You must download the 32-bit version even if you have a 64-bit machine.

Then I was able to run this. Note: it is important to give the gem installer the -with-mysql-config flag, and point it to the file mysql_config inside the bin/ directory

sudo gem install mysql – -with-mysql-config=/usr/local/mysql/bin/mysql_config

UPDATE: Me thinks the 64-bit version now works with Snow Leopard 10.6 (haven’t tested under 10.5). But you have to set the flags to use 64-bit:

Prior to Leopard:
sudo gem install mysql – -with-mysql-dir=/usr/local/mysql

Leopard on a PPC machine:
sudo env ARCHFLAGS=”-arch ppc” gem install mysql – -with-mysql-config=/usr/local/mysql/bin/mysql_config

Leopard on an Intel machine:
sudo env ARCHFLAGS=”-arch i386″ gem install mysql – -with-mysql-config=/usr/local/mysql/bin/mysql_config

Snow Leopard (only on Intel):
sudo env ARCHFLAGS=”-arch x86_64″ gem install mysql – -with-mysql-config=/usr/local/mysql/bin/mysql_config

If you don’t run this with the right architecture RCHFLAGS, you get this when you try to launch your app:

unitialized constant MysqlCompat::MysqlRes

http://techliberty.blogspot.com/2009/12/dealing-with-rake-aborted-uninitialized.html
http://weblog.rubyonrails.org/2009/8/30/upgrading-to-snow-leopard
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/991708/rails-mysql-and-snow-leopard

I had a real hard time with this one on a recent Snow Leopard upgrade, be sure to rebuild all your port installs too:
http://trac.macports.org/wiki/Migration

And finally do this:

cd /tmp
wget http://www.tmtm.org/en/ruby/mysql/ruby-mysql-0.2.6.tar.gz
tar xvfz ruby-mysql-0.2.6.tar.gz
cd ruby-mysql-0.2.6
sudo ruby install.rb

Emulated ruby tags (ERB) tags

Some handy information about working with those less-than-percent sign things that appear in Emulated Ruby, or .rhtml files.

example what it does
<% ... %> evaluate/execute ruby code
<%= ... %> evaluate & return to buffer (result will be included in output)
<%- ... %> strip whitespace before tag
<% ... -%> strip whitespace after tag

Rails Script shortcuts

Some great shortcuts for script generation. I always try to start by building scaffold for any new entity, then remove the scaffold as needed, leaving only the pieces of the scaffold which I need.

to generate a new model:
script/generate scaffold Person age:integer first:string last:string some_list_id:integer

* This will generate models, controllers, migrations & tests. ALWAYS USE THE SINGULAR when using script/generate.

* Be sure to spell the complete word integer, if you mistakenly shorten it to abbreviated form “int” the generate command will look like it has worked, but migration won’t execute.

If you make a mistake try
script/destroy (model name)

to add a field to an existing model
script/generate migration add_address_to_person address:string

to add a foreign key to an existing model
script/generate migration add_state_id_to_person state_id:integer

Categories
Programming

Passenger with Rails

Passenger is a great thing because it makes Rails apps able to be deployed on Apache.

The installation is pretty painless, but there are a few gotchas you may want to know about.

Start here: http://www.modrails.com/install.html

sudo gem install passenger

The installation will prompt you to add this to your httpd.conf file: (note the version number of passenger might be different)

LoadModule passenger_module /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/passenger-2.1.3/ext/apache2/mod_passenger.so
PassengerRoot /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/passenger-2.1.3
PassengerRuby /System/Library/Frameworks/Ruby.framework/Versions/1.8/usr/bin/ruby

If you are NOT using the Passenger preference pane, follow these instructions to add a virtual host to your Apache configuration file, and set its DocumentRoot to /somewhere/public. If you ARE using the passenger preference pane, you don’t need to do this.


RailsEnv development
ServerName mysite.local
DocumentRoot /Users/jason/DEVELOPMENT/mysite/public

Options FollowSymLinks
Order allow,deny
Allow from all

======================================================
SOME COMMON PROBLEMS
======================================================
SYMPTOM:
When first installing passenger (sudo gem install passenger), I get this error:
Building native extentions. This could take a while…
ERROR: Error installing passenger:
ERROR: Failed to build gem native extensions

FIX: Type ‘make’ at the command prompt. If you get the error “make: command not found,” then you don’t have ‘make’ (gcc compiler) installed, so your system can’t build anything. Install XCode Tools to solve this.

======================================================
SYMPTOM: Site loads but it does not go to your rails app correctly.

FIX: Check to make sure apache config file, or the file you included in apache config, is correct. Try putting your site at a different port like this:

Listen 8000

…

Remember to restart apache each time you make a change with:
sudo apachectl restart

======================================================
SYMTPOM: Browser says “500 Internal Server Error”

FIX: Check the Apache error log (Applications > Utilities > Console, click “Show Log List” if the list of logs does not appear, go to /var/log/apache2/error_log )

======================================================
SYMPTOM: *** Passenger ERROR:Could not spawn the sever the server… Permission denied

FIX: If you are running a custom ruby executable (see custom ruby executable with passenger), you may not have set your custo ruby executable file to have execute permissions.

======================================================
SYMPTOM: Routing error … no route for /YourApp

FIX: If you see this in your browser (where /YourApp is the name of your app), it is probably because you did not have this in your Rails config/environment.rb file:

Rails::Initializer.run do |config|
…
config.action_controller.relative_url_root = “/YourApp”
end
======================================================

SYMPTOM: Ruby on rails version ‘2.3.1’ not found
(or some other version)

FIX: Upgrade rails (or install the needed Rails version, more than one can run at once):
sudo gem install rails –version 2.3.1

======================================================

SYMPTOM: Apache does not respond in the browser.

FIX: Make sure that apache is started ok, try this to see if there are any errors in your httpd.conf file:
sudo apachectl configtest

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