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Phusion Passenger 3 Released: The Next Gen of Ruby Webapp Deployment »

Created at: 19.10.2010 03:08, source: Ruby Inside, tagged: News

We talked about the road to Passenger 3 a few months ago but Phusion have now reached the end of it with the final, production release of Passenger 3.0.0! Congratulations to the team.

Phusion's Passenger is the de facto way to deploy Ruby based webapps (a statement backed up by Hampton Catlin's Ruby Survey) so if you haven't yet made the jump, 3.0.0 provides a good excuse. It's as stable as ever but there's even more performance and a ton of new features, as covered in Phusion's four "technological preview" blog posts.

RVM users will also be happy to learn that it's now reasonably easy (and I say "reasonably" because you'll still need to do some reading) to deploy Passenger to cover multiple Ruby versions.

Installation and/or upgrading

Not using Passenger yet? Already running a vanilla Passenger install? Both installing and upgrading are easy (though you might want to try it in development first before going nuts on the production boxes) and work in the same way. First, install the gem:

[sudo] gem install passenger

And then run the regular installation script for either an Apache 2 install or an Nginx install (it'll install Nginx for you if you haven't already got it):

passenger-install-apache2-module

Or:

passenger-install-nginx-module

In both installation and upgrade cases, the above scripts will provide more details on what to do next (in Apache's case, it's usually as simple as copying and pasting some configuration entries into your Apache config).

Rails 3.0.1 and Rails 2.3.10 Released To Counter Nested Attributes Vulnerability »

Created at: 15.10.2010 05:00, source: Rails Inside, tagged: News

Michael Koziarski (a.k.a. nzkoz) has announced the simultaneous release of Rails 3.0.1 and 2.3.10. Don't get too excited - they're only very minor security releases intended to resolve a nasty bug that surfaced in 2.3.9 and 3.0.0. Upgrade if possible but if you're unsure, read on for some pointers.

The bug in question surrounds nested attributes that are accepted through the accepts_nested_attributes_for method. If you're not using this method, you're probably OK, though I have a big fat disclaimer over that (if you don't upgrade and your app gets fried, don't blame me ;-)).

If you're using 2.3.9 or 3.0.0 and are truly unable to upgrade at this point but are using nested attributes, Michael has included patches on this post. You might also appreciate the discussion on Hacker News if you want more info and insight.

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Mitchell Hashimoto Joins Engine Yard OSS Community Grant Program »

Created at: 14.10.2010 20:12, source: Engine Yard Blog, tagged: News

Engine Yard is trying to find new ways to help Open Source. Our current thinking is that you help an OSS project by helping its core developer(s) get in front of audiences via conferences, documentation, our own Engine Yard blog, webinars, and more. Especially so with conferences, when you see and meet the person behind a project you’re more likely to give it a try, become a user or contributor, and to help that project thrive. This is our idea for how we can help, and this is the goal of the Engine Yard OSS Community Grant program.

There is some very important work to be done in the virtualization space, particularly as it's a key building block for scalable cloud infrastructure. To help pave the way, Engine Yard is very excited to offer an OSS Community Grant to Mitchell Hashimoto.

Mitchell Hashimoto has two important Ruby projects you may have heard of: virtualbox and vagrant. He's also started work on a third: a quality Ruby wrapper for a C-library libvirt (a library to interact with VMs & virtualization capabilities in an operating system).

The quality of Mitchell’s contributions can be quickly seen from:

i) http://vagrantup.com/ ii) the 4 line example on this page to get a fully configured local VM up and running:

$ gem install vagrant
$ vagrant box add base http://files.vagrantup.com/lucid32.box
$ vagrant init
$ vagrant up

(assumes you have Oracle’s VirtualBox installed).

The Engine Yard OSS Community Grant package for Mitchell is intended to help him, his projects, and the larger community. His grant will help fund things including: attending speaking engagements and conferences, marketing and documentation assistance, and more. We’ll also help him spread the word about all the cool work he’s doing, so don’t be surprised if you see him pop up on the Engine Yard blog or at an upcoming technical webinar!

Our aim with the Engine Yard OSS Community Grant program is to help critical projects and OSS contributors to gain traction while growing their user base and contributor base, and ensuring these OS projects have long-term, healthy lives.

Mitchell is now the 2nd member of the Engine Yard OSS Community Grant program after Yehuda Katz.

It’s been wonderful meeting and working with Mitchell, and we are happy to support him and his work. We look forward to continuing to work with him and seeing him speak at many Ruby conferences next year!

Michael Hartl’s 15 Hours of Rails 3 Screencasts »

Created at: 13.10.2010 21:40, source: Ruby Inside, tagged: News Ruby on Rails

Have you seen Michael Hartl's RailsTutorial.org? It's a free online "book" that walks you through from start to finish with building either a Rails 2.3 or Rails 3.0 app (though a $39 PDF rendering is also available). After finishing the book, Michael set to work on some screencasts covering the same ground in video form and it's now released: the The Ruby on Rails Tutorial screencasts, clocking in at over 15 hours of content, are now live (and you can get 10% off with code rubyinside02).

Michael's project is the latest in a line of self publishing efforts in the Ruby and Rails communities and it's gone down a storm on Hacker News. Michael did such a great job with the free content that you know the videos are going to be easy to follow and value packed. I got review access to all of the material a week ago and can confirm that, yes, these screencasts are awesome (as long as watching over 15 hours of screencasts is your cup of tea). I've seen people compare them to the style used by Ryan Bates on his Railscasts and I'd go along with that. Direct and practical.

At $85, they might seem steep to some readers, but if you basically want to be able to look "over the shoulder" of an experienced Rails developer and see how a Rails development environment is set up and how multiple apps are built, there's nothing that can beat this. This isn't a set of "build a blog in 15 minutes" videos - it's a complete course that could kick off a new career for you with Rails 3.0. And I say this without even getting any affiliate income from this (boo, hiss) so my recommendation stands alone from any financial gain.

So if you want to learn Rails 3.0 in a practical manner from the ground up, check out Michael's screencasts. And if you choose to buy, use the code rubyinside02 to get 10% off. Bon appetit.

Wesley Beary and fog Promoted to the Engine Yard Open Source Program »

Created at: 13.10.2010 14:11, source: Engine Yard Blog, tagged: News fog open-source

There's a lot of muscle under the hood of the Engine Yard AppCloud and xCloud offerings providing Rails/Ruby automation, management and support. I am ecstatic to announce that a critical layer of our automation -- fog, the Ruby library for cloud computing and provisioning, along with its creator Wesley Beary -- are being promoted to the Engine Yard Open Source Program! The momentum of cloud computing will only grow in 2011 and we feel it is critical that Wesley helps fog and the Ruby cloud community lead the way. The buzzword "cloud" is regularly misused, often to the point that it's almost synonymous with the base concept of the "Internet" itself. A good definition is "on-demand self-service Internet infrastructure where you use only what you need, all managed by a browser, application or API." ISPs and new entrants are clamoring to rebrand themselves as "cloud providers" or to create new cloud infrastructure; and so the fight for mind share and market share begins. Arguably Amazon's AWS cloud suite is both the early pioneer, and the current front runner. The fog library is an abstraction layer to provision resources (for example, EC2 computing or S3 storage resources) across the growing array of cloud providers. Most recently, our community's own gemcutter rubygems service was reimplemented to use fog to control AWS S3 for storing rubygems. Wesley started the fog project before he joined Engine Yard. After he came on-board, fog was adopted to replace the hard-wired AWS-specific portions of Engine Yard AppCloud. He's been working on fog in his spare time. The cloud space is quickly evolving and gaining momentum across a growing number of competing vendors and stakeholders. At Engine Yard, we feel it's critical to invest in ensuring the continued success of fog as a strong, active community project. Fog isn't just a library for huge platforms such as Engine Yard's AppCloud or xCloud. It is the ideal library to use instead of pulling out your favourite AWS-based library. Using fog instead of an AWS-specific library means your code is deliberately independent of any one infrastructure vendor from day one. For example, to get started using fog:

sudo gem install fog

>> server = AWS.servers.create
ArgumentError: image_id is required for this operation
>> server = AWS.servers.create(:image_id => 'ami-5ee70037')
  
>> server.destroy # cleanup after yourself or regret $$$ it
true