Updating a tiny Rails app from Rails 3.1 to Rails 4.2

In 2011 I wrote a small Rails app in order to learn Ruby better and see what all the fuss was about – this was Antipodes, a website that shows you the antipodes of a given point or country/state using google maps.

I built it using the latest and greatest version of Rails available at the time, which was 3.2. It has since fell to various security issues and has been superseded by newest version, and is currently unsupported.

I’ve been aware of these limitations and decided not to carry on hosting on such an old version, so I just stopped the nginx instance that was powering it and left it aside.

Until now! I had some time to spare recently, so I decided to upgrade.

Updating to Rails 3.2

The railsguide documentation about upgrading suggests not to update straight to the latest version of Rails, but to do it by steps instead. The first one for me was to update from 3.1 to 3.2.

First up, let’s update our Gemfile to pick up on the new Rails version, and let’s dive in!

The first issue I ran into was that the :timestamps model field definition are now marked as NON NULL. I wasn’t actively using these, so I decided to remove them from the DB rather than fixing DB import code.

My next issue was that some gems would not install properly – I decided to use the newest version of Ruby available on the system, 2.2, and it was not happy at my Gemfile requiring ruby-debug19. Fair enough, let’s remove it.

My next problem didn’t come from Rails itself, but rather from the gem I used to generate Google Maps, Gmaps4Rails. It underwent a serious rewrite in the past 4 years and now needed very different code under the hood – no problem. It also allowed me to clean some of the .coffee files and make better use of the assets pipeline.

An lo, the website was running under Rails 3.2!

Upgrading to Rails 4.0

The next step was to upgrade to Rails 4.0. This was very straightforward, a quick change in the Gemfile and a change to route handling (match was retired in favour of using the actual HTTP verbs of the route being handled, e.g. get) made it work, and a couple of new config options silenced the deprecation warnings.

Upgrading to Rails 4.2

And finally, the upgrade from Rails 4.0 to Rails 4.2 was made through the Gemfile only, no update was needed on the code itself.

 

And here we are! Antipodes is now up to date with its dependencies, and waiting for a new nginx+passenger to run again (more on that soon!).

Rails in a week — day 7

Today was the last day of my Rails week. I added some database-backing to my app (with a fully scaffolded model and all!) for the countries’ data and refactored a fair bit, though I’m still unsure about a few decisions I made, such as if I should put the base data in seeds.rb or in a migration. Oh, well.

The website is available here:

http://antipodes.plui.es

And its source code is on GitHub.

So?

Writing this website taught me quite a lot about Rails in general, from its innards to automated deployment. I still have a lot to learn, and more importantly a lot of practice to do before I can say I’m competent with Rails, but that was a great start. *self-pat on the back*

The more important thing to me is that even though I didn’t have the time to learn each of the aspects of the Rails ecosystem inside and out, I have a better overview of “what does what” in Rails, and a lot of good pointers to learn more when needed.

Buzzword bingo!

All in all, I learned (“began learning” would be more appropriate):

  • Vagrant, and a tiny bit of Chef
  • Rails (eh!): MVC, migrations, the global directory structure, views/partials, the asset pipeline, etc.
  • RVM
  • Bundler
  • Rake
  • Spork
  • Autotest
  • RSpec
  • Capistrano

Loose ends

Well, although I think I understood a fair amount of what I set out to learn, I still don’t grasp Chef at all, and didn’t really adhere to the philosophy of TDD through the week. My tests are really basic and not very satisfying; writing meaningful tests seems like quite an difficult art that I’ll have to learn more about.

Another thing that bugs me a bit is that it took more time than I originally thought to do a lot of the things I set out to do. This is probably due to inexperience, so in a way I’m curing it? I guess? I probably could have gained some time by asking a few questions on things like IRC, but it felt a bit stupid when there’s such a trove of information about Rails online. Indeed, googling and reading guides or StackOverflow threads / mail threads always ended up giving the answer; but maybe not as fast as IRC would’ve been.

Oh, and the design of the website is pretty terrible, but that wasn’t really the goal (and CSS has never been my forte).

What now?

Well, as far as Rails go, I’m ready to tackle bigger things. I hope to find a Rails job in Wellington (wink wink nudge nudge if you’re reading this from New Zealand ;) ) and put this freshly-acquired knowledge to good use!

I also hope these blog posts might help a newcomer to Rails, but they ended up being half ranting and half specific bug-finding, so I’m not sure of their value as a learning tool. Or as a read to anyone else than me actually. I’ll just post this on HN and let the crowd decide.

Rails in a week — day 6

TL;DR: testing works, I learned i18n, and fixed a bug through TDD.

 

After writing a simple little functional test and making it run through rake test, albeit slowly, I installed Spork and autotest. From what I gathered, Spork is an RSpec-only thing, so I wrote a few RSpec tests instead of functional tests. After a bit of tweaking, everything was going smoothly between Spork and autotest, all running RSpec, but my file in test/ was ignored. Moving on.

I fixed the bug causing a 500 error when an empty string was entered on the main screen, by writing the following spec:

it "should not render en empty request" do
  get :address, :q => ""
  response.should_not render_template("address")
  response.should redirect_to("/")
end

Which was red, then green (yay!). I once read that TDD introduced a “strange smoothing feeling” (paraphrasing), which is definitely true: seeing automated tests pass contributes quite a lot to one’s peace of mind.

I also used the flash hash to flash a notification that the address was invalid. Actually making the notice “flash” (i.e. appear and disappear) took a bit of jQuery (nothing fancy, but still!).

Moving on, my next goal was i18n (internationalisation), to make my website switch automatically from English to French depending on the browser’s HTTP Accept-language header. After a quick read of the official website’s own guide on i18n (excellent as usual), I modified the files as needed (just noticed I didn’t split up my locale files, which maybe I should have done) and set out to find how to change the language depending on the HTTP header.

Apparently this isn’t “the Rails way”, because it isn’t RESTful; two request to the same URL won’t give back the same result depending on the browser’s configured language. Instead, Rails recommends either 1) an explicit ?locale= parameter in the URL, 2) modifying the routing scheme from, say, /page to /en/page and /fr/page, or even 3) using two separate domains, e.g. myapp.com and myapp.fr. I’m not really fond of the first solution, the second one is okay but should be thought out from the start, and the third one is great but doesn’t fit my needs here. HTTP headers it is.

Thankfully, the http-accept-language gem allows you to easily find the best match between which language(s) the browser demands and which language(s) you can provide. Changing the locale according to this data was a simple before_filter away in the ApplicationController. I used the debugger and curl commands (the -H option allows writing custom headers) to make sure everything was working correctly.

I went back to Spork after a while, not exactly understanding why autotest wasn’t doing the same thing as rake test. If I understand correctly, it looks like autotest runs either rspec or test::unit (which doesn’t only cover unit tests, but also functional tests, etc, as long as they’re under test/), and that Spork being RSpec-only, autotest+Spork only worked with RSpec. After some more research, Spork actually supports test::unit… As a separate gem, spork-testunit. And those two are completely separated: they don’t listen on the same port and are called by completely different commands (respectively rspec spec and testdrb).

A quite hackish workaround is to start two different Spork servers with bin/spork TestUnit & bin/spork RSpec, and to add hooks to autotest to launch Unit::Tests too in the .autotest file. It means Test::Unit is only launched after some specs needed re-testing instead of the traditional “a file change, it runs tests”, but it still works.

Now, I guess the problem is that a project won’t need to have testing done both in RSpec and in Test::Unit. I could be wrong about that, but it seems that the goals and end results of both framework are pretty similar.

 

With all that testing, I didn’t have time to implement my country-wide search, which I hope to do tomorrow for this week’s final day.

Rails in a week — day 5

TL;DR: polishing. Trying to get into TDD, but slowness makes it a strange experience.

This “day 5” has been more or less spread over two days because of other engagements (mowing the lawn and subscribing an insurance policy for abroad if you wish to know the details), and I didn’t keep precise tracks of the steps I took.

The major milestone is that the MVP for Antipodes is online at http://antipodes.plui.es (and has its own repo on GitHub). I threw away all of the first rails project and restarted from a clean slate, then roughly followed the same steps again (Bundler, Capistrano, etc) and added back the logic. I also polished the whole thing: instead of manually entering the request in the URL (eh, it was a prototype…), there’s a form and everything. There’s even a purdy logo!

Back to some more Rails-y stuff: I tried to start working on some Test-Driven Development, but at over 30 seconds per test round with a single assert true, I couldn’t really get into any sort of good flow. autotest manages to run the tests in around 20 seconds (and more importantly in the background), but it’s still way too much. I just noticed that Spork might be a good solution, I will try it tomorrow.

Once the tests are automated and fast enough, I will start bugfixing (for example right now an empty chain results in a 500 error) and adding another new functionality: whole countries!

Rails in a week — day 4

TL;DR: it deploys! Finally!

 

After a full day spend battling cryptic error messages, I finally got my 10-lines Rails app to deploy.

First thing in the morning, I decided to switch to using rvm on my production machine too, in order to have the same setup and version on Ruby (1.9.2) for testing and production. This meant also reinstalling the important gems (bundler, rails, rake).

The production machine uses nginx+Passenger, which I reinstalled (following instructions here) in order to work smoothly with this now rvm-ed ruby.

The first problems I ran into were Capistrano issues. For some reason, the git repository for the rails project (the one I also put on GitHub) wasn’t the base rails folder, but merely contained all of rails under /sample/. Capistrano didn’t like that at all: it relies on having the standard Rails architecture available at root level.

For example, in order to run bundler on the remote machine during deployment, Capistrano looks for the Gemfile and Gemfile.lock (possibly only the Gemfile.lock) in the base folder of the git repo. My Gemfile wasn’t in /Gemfile, but in /sample/Gemfile. A setting exists to tell Capistrano where to look for the Gemfile, but it then breaks in other subtle ways (notably during the migrations). I changed the structure so that all of the rails things appear at the root of the git repo (i.e. the Right Way), and Capistrano bundled gems like a champ.

Another problem was nginx configuration. In order to follow Capistrano’s model, nginx ‘server’ directive must look something like:

	server {
		listen 80;
		server_name (server name);
		root /(capistrano's deploy_to in deploy.rb)/current/public/;
		passenger_enabled on;
	}

Yesterday night, it was set up at (capistrano’s deploy_to)/current/sample/public/, because of the peculiar directory structure. That’s what caused the 403 forbidden: Passenger had no idea what was there, because Capistrano couldn’t understand it either and deploy correctly.

Once all of this was straightened up, I switched from nginx error messages to Passenger error messages, which was a good thing (getting closer to Rails!). The first few ones were gems that couldn’t be found due to a missing lines in the Gemfile and commented out line in deploy.rb. Then, a notice that rake was missing despite it being included in the Gemfile and correctly bundled (I saw it being bundled, I swear!): it turned out that Bundler was using the production machine’s ruby 1.8 to create his bundle when he should have been using rvm’s 1.9.2. A few more lines in deploy.rb. The last error was that the database didn’t exist. Indeed, when running a `cap deploy:update`, the whole directory was swiped out and replaced by the latest revision in Git, and Git excludes the database by default (which is sensible). `cap deploy:migrations` is the way to go to recreate you SQLite3 database in production.

After all of this, Capistrano seemed to deploy without any trouble, the gems were correctly bundled, and loading the app in a browser went to… Suspense… An error message. But a Rails one this time, which is still a Good Thing.

Going through nginx production logs showed this message:

ActionView::Template::Error (gmaps4rails.css isn't precompiled):
    1: <% #thanks to enable_css, user can avoid this css to be loaded
    2: if enable_css == true and options[:scripts].nil? %>
    3:     <% content_for :head do %>
    4:     <%= stylesheet_link_tag 'gmaps4rails' %>
    5:     <% end %>
    6: <% end %>
    7: <% content_for :scripts do %>
  app/views/antipodes_one/show.html.erb:5:in `_app_views_antipodes_one_show_html_erb___4541095793564774527_30741960'

And here began my journey though the magical world of Rails 3.1 Brand New Asset Pipeline.

The asset pipeline is a great idea implemented in a weird way that breaks things. The more I learn about rails, the more it seems like that’s the standard modus operandi of the community: move fast, don’t worry if it breaks ancient stuff (“ancient” being loosely defined as “more than a year old”). The biggest problem of this approach is the constant learning it implies, and the fact that a lot of the tutorials or workarounds you find with a quick googling will be out of date or broken. I guess that’s the price to pay for the constant innovation going on in the Ruby world. Ah, well, software philosophy.

Anyways, Rails’ new Asset Pipeline’s job is to interpret, downsize and concatenate coffeescript and scss files into static files ready to be served — a step referred to as “precompilation” — in order to facilitate caching and reduce load times. Precompilation can either be done during deployment, e.g. as a Capistrano hook (“recipe” if I understand the lingo), or before deploying entirely, through a rake task: `RAILS_ENV=production bundle exec rake assets:precompile` — you’ll then add those new files to source control and they’ll be transferred during the standard Capistrano deploy phase. You can even skip the precompilation phase entirely and set a config switch in application.rb telling rails to compile the assets on-the-fly at runtime.

None of those options worked. gmaps4rails.css stubbornly stayed uncompiled.

After a fair amount of time being stuck on this issue (notably because each precompiling takes 30 seconds for a handful of files), I found an answer on StackOverflow: adding `config.assets.precompile += [‘gmaps4rails.css’]` in application.rb managed to convince Rails to precompile that file too.

A quick (sorta) precompiling, git add && push and Capistrano deploy later, everything finally came together and worked. Phew!

Goals for tomorrow: stop worrying about deployment and go deeper in pure Rails code. Add some custom CSS, more logic, and get some tests up and running.