Ruby on Rails Planet

Launching Ruby on Rails projects, the video »

Created at: 11.11.2009 20:00, source: Robby on Rails, tagged: Business Ruby on Rails PLANET ARGON Projects agile development clients presentation conference rubyonrails video

For those of you who didn’t make it to Rails Underground in July to witness my mind-blowing talk, Launching Ruby on Rails projects , it appears that Skills Matter has finally posted a video of it online. :-)

The sound levels are really low… but hopefully you’ll find it helpful.

You can also view the slides.

Launching Ruby on Rails projects, a checklist

Tracking Google Analytics events in development environment with GoogleAnalyticsProxy »

Created at: 01.11.2009 21:55, source: Robby on Rails, tagged: Ruby on Rails PostgreSQL javascript analytics kpi googleanalytics events proxy opensource github prototype

As mentioned in a recent article¹, I’ve been diving deep into Google Analytics lately while working on a few client projects. We’re aiming to use much more of the features of Google Analytics and have been hitting some roadblocks with the development versus production application environments. Once you begin to dive into event tracking and AJAX-driven goal conversions, relying on just the sample code that Google Analytics provides you is going to result in you looking at a handful of JavaScript errors.

another example from the firebug javascript console…

We see JavaScript errors like this because we don’t load the google analytics code in our development environments. As you can see, we are only loading this in our production environment.

  <% if RAILS_ENV == 'production' -%>
    <!--// Google Analytics //-->
    <script type="text/javascript">
    var gaJsHost = (("https:" == document.location.protocol) ? "https://ssl." : "http://www.");
    document.write(unescape("%3Cscript src='" + gaJsHost + "google-analytics.com/ga.js' type='text/javascript'%3E%3C/script%3E"));
    </script>
    <script type="text/javascript">
    var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-XXXXXX-1");
    pageTracker._trackPageview();
    </script>
  <% end -%>

To track an event with Google Analytics, you’d need to trigger something like:

  pageTracker._trackEvent('Button', 'Click', 'Get in touch');

As you can see from our code earlier, in development, the pageTracker variable isn’t defined and that’s why we’re getting those JS errors. We also don’t want to add conditionals everywhere in our application to check if we’re in development or production environment.. as that’d just make our views uglier than they need to be. So, I decided that I’d create a proxy class in JavaScript that would allow us to trigger _trackEvent() and _trackPageview() and handle it appropriately.

This class works with the following logic:

if google analytics is loaded, pass the parameters to the real pageTracker
if google analytics is NOT loaded, output the information to console.log() for debugging purposes

For example, on a gallery on our web site… we track when people navigate next and/or previous through the photos. In our development environment, I can watch the JavaScript console output the following:

And in our production environment, we can see that this was sent to Google Analytics.

We’re able to do this by initializing the GoogleAnalyticsProxy class and calling these functions through it. For example:

  _gap = new GoogleAnalyticsProxy();
  _gap._trackEvent('Video', 'Play', 'Homepage video');
  _gap._trackEvent('Video', 'Pause', 'Homepage video');
  _gap._trackEvent('Button', 'Click', 'Call to action X');

You’ll see that we’re just calling _gap versus pageTracker. We then replace all the instances of pageTracker (except where it is defined in the google analytics code block they provide you). You’ll find this located near the bottom of our application.html.erb file.

<% if RAILS_ENV == 'production' -%>
  <!--// Google Analytics //-->
  <script type="text/javascript">
  var gaJsHost = (("https:" == document.location.protocol) ? "https://ssl." : "http://www.");
  document.write(unescape("%3Cscript src='" + gaJsHost + "google-analytics.com/ga.js' type='text/javascript'%3E%3C/script%3E"));
  </script>
  <script type="text/javascript">
  var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-XXXXXX-1");
  pageTracker._trackPageview();
  </script>
<% end -%>

<script type="text/javascript">
  var _gap = new GoogleAnalyticsProxy();
</script>

We now have _gap available throughout our project and can call _trackEvent() and _trackPageview() with it. Note: You can use any JS variable name that you want, _gap is just what I went with.

Get GoogleAnalyticsProxy

I’ve gone ahead and tossed this small JavaScript class (known as GoogleAnalyticsProxy) on Github for your enjoyment. I have some more articles in the works that will show you some tips for how to make the most of Google Analytics. If you have any questions and/or ideas for related article topics, don’t hesitate to let me know.

¹ Tracking AJAX-driven events in Ruby on Rails for Google Analytics conversion goals

Planet Argon Podcast, Episode 2: The Letter Scotch »

Created at: 30.10.2009 15:27, source: Robby on Rails, tagged: Ruby on Rails PLANET ARGON planetargon rubyonrails agile podcast javascript html css firefox firebug safari debugbar internetexplorer webbrowsers webinspector itunes

Earlier this week our new podcast was approved and is now available in the Apple iTunes Store. We’re also soliciting topic ideas for future episodes on brainstormr.

We posted Episode 2, The Letter Scotch, yesterday for your enjoyment. In this episode, we covered a handful of web browser tools that we use (and detest) to debug HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. This included Web Inspector, Firebug, DebugBar, and a handful of other tools. We all have slightly different preferences, depending on the tasks that we’re working on and the team had an open dialogue about the pros/cons of each of these tools.

You can learn more about and listen to our podcast at http://planetargon.com/podcast.

Thanks in advance for listening!

Amazon RDS: Amazon Relational Database Service or MySQL in the Cloud for Ruby On Rails. »

Created at: 29.10.2009 05:02, source: OnRails.org, tagged: Ruby on Rails

For watchthatsite.com (not public yet) I have an instance on EC2 with Rails and MySQL but was looking for a more solid hosting solution for MySQL. And how fortunate, Amazon came out with the solution I need this week. Basically with two command line instructions you can start a new server with mysql configured, tuned, and secured. In this blog entry I will go through the steps that perform to move my sql database to Amazon RDS.

You can find more information on Amazon Relational Database Service (API Version 2009-10-16) here.

Prerequisite: you need to signup for an account on aws.amazon.com, it can be used for EC2, S3, SimpleDb and all the other services AWS provides.

1) Install the Command Line Toolkit

First thing, go download the command line toolkit and read the README.TXT on how to install it. In short you unzip the files, I did put mine at /Developer/aws/RDSCli-1.0.001. Then you create a credential file which contains your AWS access key id and secret key. Then I configured my ~/.bash_profile as follows:

export AWS_RDS_HOME=/Developer/aws/RDSCli-1.0.001
export AWS_CREDENTIAL_FILE=$AWS_RDS_HOME/credential-file-path.conf
export JAVA_HOME=/Library/Java/Home
export PATH=$AWS_RDS_HOME/bin:$PATH

to see that the command line toolkit is setup correctly type $rds—help

You will need the command line tool to execute several commands described here after.

2) Create an Instance

Let’s create a MySQL Server instance. RDS offers the following 5 server instance classes:

db.m1.small (1.7 GB of RAM, $0.11 per hour)
db.m1.large (7.5 GB of RAM, $0.44 per hour)
db.m1.xlarge (15 GB of RAM, $0.88 per hour)
db.m2.2xlarge (34 GB of RAM, $1.55 per hour)
db.m2.4xlarge (68 GB of RAM, $3.10 per hour)

I will choose a small instance which I will call dbserver1 with a database name db1 and allocate 5g of database space. I also set the master username as admin and password as secret.

$ rds-create-db-instance --db-instance-identifier db1 --allocated-storage 5 --db-instance-class db.m1.small --engine MySQL5.1 --master-username admin --master-user-password secret --db-name db1 --headers

The output is the following:

DBINSTANCE  DBInstanceId  Class        Engine    Storage  Master Username  Status    Backup Retention
DBINSTANCE  db1           db.m1.small  mysql5.1  5        admin            creating  1               
      SECGROUP  Name     Status
      SECGROUP  default  active
      PARAMGRP  Group Name        Apply Status
      PARAMGRP  default.mysql5.1  in-sync

Now you have a server running and you are being billed $0.11 per hour, that’s like $80 a month without bandwidth but with backup…and it took only 2 minutes to get going. Can’t beat that.

To see all the instances you have you can issue the

rds-describe-db-instances --headers

3) Grant Network Access

So I will grant access from my notebook, assuming the ip address is 24.19.0.48 (you can also specify ranges i.e. 24.19.0.0/50). (Note that access was revoked by AWS, not sure why??)

rds-authorize-db-security-group-ingress default --cidr-ip 24.19.0.48 --headers

I also have an ec2 instance which I want to grant access to

rds-authorize-db-security-group-ingress default --ec2-security-group-name watchthatsite --ec2-security-group-owner-id 526541544691

Note the ec2-security-group-owner-id is your Amazon AWS account number, you can find it for example on you account activity page. To see your security configuration issue the following command: rds-describe-db-security-groups default—headers

4) Using the Database

To use your database you first need to find out the endpoint address of your new server. So describe you instances:

rds-describe-db-instances --headers command

DBINSTANCE  DBInstanceId  Created                   Class        Engine    Storage  Master Username  Status     Endpoint Address                              Port  AZ          Backup Retention
DBINSTANCE  db1           2009-10-28T22:53:31.666Z  db.m1.small  mysql5.1  5        admin            available  db1.cyhik6zpub5c.us-east-1.rds.amazonaws.com  3306  us-east-1b  1               
      SECGROUP  Name     Status
      SECGROUP  default  active
      PARAMGRP  Group Name        Apply Status
      PARAMGRP  default.mysql5.1  in-sync

You find out your endpoint address, for me db1.cyhik6zpub5c.us-east-1.rds.amazonaws.com

So now you can connect to your database:

mysql -h db1.cyhik6zpub5c.us-east-1.rds.amazonaws.com -P 3306 -u admin -p db1

Let’s configure my Rails application to point to that database and run a migration:

So I change my config/database.yml to point to the above database

development:
    adapter: mysql
    host: db1.cyhik6zpub5c.us-east-1.rds.amazonaws.com
    reconnect: false
    database: db1
    username: admin
    password: secret

 rake db:migrate

Wow, seem to work.

Let connect to the mysql console and do a show tables;

+-------------------+
| Tables_in_db1     |
+-------------------+
| schema_migrations | 
| users             | 
| watches           | 
+-------------------+

Yep, all there.

Now I still have to move my old production database to the new one, so let’s dump the data from my old database:

mysqldump watchthatsite_development -u admin > wts.sql

and reload that data in the new database:

mysql -h db1.cyhik6zpub5c.us-east-1.rds.amazonaws.com -P 3306 -u admin -p db1 < wts.sql

Restarting my Rails server…That’s all!

Enjoy, Daniel.

Planet Argon Podcast, Episode 1: Shin Splints »

Created at: 23.10.2009 02:50, source: Robby on Rails, tagged: Ruby on Rails PLANET ARGON podcast authlogic gems machinist faker less css textorize

We’re currently waiting to get our new podcast approved by Apple, but have uploaded episode 1 to tumblr in the meantime.

In this short episode, we cover the following topics:

We’re planning to keep this short and focused to a few topics. Once it’s posted on iTunes, we’ll let you know.

Please consider subscribing to the podcast. Enjoy!

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