Rails deployment has been solved
Everyone knows that Rails deployment is a massive pain, right? Wrong. It’s time we all erased this outdated notion from our heads.
I just installed Redmine on my server, and it was simple. Thanks to mod_rails, the sum total of web server configuration needed was this:
<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerName dev.redcaride.com
DocumentRoot /home/dbl/redmine/public
<Directory "/home/dbl/redmine/public">
Options FollowSymLinks
AllowOverride None
Order allow,deny
Allow from all
</Directory>
</VirtualHost>
No mongrels, no proxy_balancers, no FCGI (shudder). This was actually easier than when I installed WordPress on the same server last week.
So never again be put off a Rails application because you’re scared of deploying it! The world of open-source Rails applications opens up before you….
Regex Replacer
Here is a little Ruby library that may be useful to you. It is a regular expression string replacing tool. It’s similar to what you can do with String#gsub in Ruby, but with a few more features.
I needed this library to get Textmate snippets working in Redcar, and therefore it uses a slightly different syntax to gsub (”$1″ instead of “\1″). Here are some examples:
rr = RegexReplace.new(/nuclear (\w+)/,
"solar $1")
rr.rep("nuclear nutcracker")
=> "solar nutcracker"
So far so obvious. That’s identical to Ruby gsub but with “\1″ changed to “$1″. Here’s something more useful:
rr = RegexReplace.new(/nuclear (\w+)/,
"solar \\u$1")
rr.rep("nuclear nutcracker")
=> "solar Nutcracker"
Whee! Letters following “\u” are upcased. What else can it do?
Upcase stretches with \U…\E
rr = RegexReplace.new(/nuclear (\w+)/,
"solar \\U$1\\E")
rr.rep("nuclear nutcracker")
=> "solar NUTCRACKER"
You can downcase in exactly the same way with “\l” and “\L..\E”.
Conditional replacement with (?1:then:else)
rr = RegexReplace.new(/nuclear( \w+)?/,
"solar(?1:$1: thingy)")
rr.rep("nuclear nutcracker")
=> "solar nutcracker"
rr.rep("nuclear")
=> "solar thingy"
You can also combine the operators in this fashion “\l\U…\E” to get (for instance) “fOO” from “foo”.
If you find it useful please let me know.
About
Daniel Lucraft, London, UK. Interested in Ruby, Prolog and software.