Mephisto, Multi-Site and Lighttpd

After playing around with Lighttpd’s rewrite abilities, I think I have a set-up that enables Mephisto caching goodness. The following is how I have chosen to configure Mephisto, so your mileage may vary:

1) Install Mephisto in your home directory (MEPHISTO_HOME).

2) For each domain you want to set-up, use a config like this:

$HTTP["host"] =~ "foo.com" {
  server.document-root = foo_com_docroot
  server.error-handler-404 = "/mephisto/dispatch.fcgi"
  url.rewrite = ( "/$" => "/mephisto/cache/foo.com/index.html", "/(images|stylesheets|javascripts)/mephisto/(.+)$" => "/mephisto/$1/mephisto/$2", "/(images|stylesheets|javascripts)/(.+)$" => "/mephisto/cache/foo.com/$1/$2", "/assets/(.+)$" => "/mephisto/assets/foo.com/$1", "/([.]+)$" => "/mephisto/cache/foo.com/$1.html" )
  fastcgi.server = ( ".fcgi" =>
   ( "localhost" =>
     ( "socket" => "/home/YOU/var/run/lighttpd-fcgi-blog.socket",
       "bin-path" => mephisto_root + "/dispatch.fcgi",
       "bin-environment" => ( "RAILS_ENV" => "production" ),
       "min-procs" => 1, "max-procs" => 2, "idle-timeout" => 60 )
     )
   )
}

3) In the docroot for foo.com (~/domains/foo.com/web/public, etc) create a symlink to your mephisto public folder:

cd ~/domains/foo.com/web/public; ln -s ~/mephisto/public mephisto

That’s it! I hope I’m not forgetting anything. Feedback would be appreciated.

My Code Page

I’ve create a code page to share plugins, extension, libraries, etc that I write. I seeded this page with three Mephisto plugins that I had put together for DCKickball. Enjoy!

Review: Ruby on Rails – Up and Running

• Ruby on Rails – Up and Running
• Bruce A. Tate & Curt Hibbs
• O’Reilly Media, 2006
• This review has also been posted to RubyDC.org

AMRUG

This stands for the Adams Morgan Ruby Users Group. I’ve been asked to stop by their next meeting this Sunday at 3pm and spend 10 minutes talking about my experiences building RoR apps for DCKickball. Should be interesting. I’ve never been much into the “user group” scene, which is odd because I consider myself to be a pretty social person.

Getting There…

So, I’ve just finished importing 610 entries into my blog’s database. As I mentioned before, I had used a tool called Warrick to scour the caches of various search (Google, Yahoo, etc) and archiving (Internet Archive) services to reconstruct a snapshot of cubanlinks.org. This process left me with 1029 files scattered throughout 1106 directories.

(Remember, /archives/2003/12/01/some-post/index.html is comprised of 5 directories and 1 file)

So, the next step was to get these static files into the database. I accomplished this by writing a script in Ruby to extract title/date/body information from the page and insert these values into the database using ActiveRecord. Thank god for Typo being kind enough to fill in the other values for me on save (guid, permalink, etc).

It’s unclear how many posts never got recovered with Warrick in the first place. Eyeballing it, I’d say I have at least 80% of my posts. And you know what? I’ll take that.

Rails 1.0

Ruby on Rails is 1.0 spread the word.

Many-to-many-to-many

I encountered a problem today with the Ruby on Rails application that I’m working on. It involved something that I haven’t found much information on-line about: many-to-many-to-many relationships.

Read more…

Ruby on Rails PayPal IPN Code Example

I thought I’d share the skeleton of some code I had to write for PayPal’s backend IPN API.

<br /> # process the PayPal <span class="caps">IPN POST</span><br /> def paypal_ipn<br /> if @request.method == :post<br /> # use the POSTed information to create a call back <span class="caps">URL</span> to PayPal<br /> @query = ‘cmd=_notify-validate’<br /> @request.params.each_pair {|key, value| @query = @query + ’&’ + key + ’=’<br /> + value.first if key != ‘register/pay_pal_ipn.html/pay_pal_ipn’ }</p> <ol> <li><span class="caps">POST</span> this data<br /> http = Net::HTTP.start(PAYPAL_URL, 80)<br /> response = http.post(’/cgi-bin/webscr’, @query)<br /> http.finish</li> </ol> <p># PayPal values<br /> item_name = @params[:item_name]<br /> item_number = @params[:item_number]<br /> payment_status = @params[:payment_status]<br /> payment_amount = @params[:mc_gross]<br /> payment_currency = @params[:mc_currency]<br /> txn_id = @params[:txn_id]<br /> receiver_email = @params[:receiver_email]<br /> payer_email = @params[:payer_email]<br/><br/> if response<br /> if response.body.chomp ‘VERIFIED’<br /> # check the payment status<br /> if payment_status ‘Completed’<br /> # check to see if the txn_id already exists</p> <p> # your logic here<br /> end<br /> end<br /> else<br /> # <span class="caps">GET</span> request, wtf<br /> @text = ‘I do not speak <span class="caps">GET</span>’<br /> end<br /> rescue Net::HTTPError<br /> @text = ‘HTTP error’<br /> end<br />

This method exists inside of a controller class. I’m certainly not saying that this is the best or most elegant way to handle this, just that I couldn’t find any examples to rip-off myself.

Let me know if you have any suggestions. WARNING: this code does not communicate with PayPal’s servers over SSL.