Masterview users - Sep 2006 - Have site, now must travel. IOW, how do I generate a non-MV site from MV?

Hi,

Now that we have completed development, we need to publish our site to
the hosting co. I need to get the actual ERB (.rhtml) files for that.
I tried rake mv:parse, but that didn''t actually create any files. I
set my RAILS_ENV to ''production'', and it says "Generated
erb/rhtml
output was created in app/views/** tree. But there are none there.
Only .html files.

What have I done wrong?

Thanks
Ed

-- 
Ed Howland
http://greenprogrammer.blogspot.com

Ed,

All you need to do is set your config setting

config.generate_rhtml_files = true

You can do this in config/masterview/settings.rb or one of the
config/masterview/environments files.

When you restart your app it will generate all of them on startup.

Best,

Jeff

On 9/15/06, Ed Howland <ed.howland at gmail.com>
wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Now that we have completed development, we need to publish our site to
> the hosting co. I need to get the actual ERB (.rhtml) files for that.
> I tried rake mv:parse, but that didn''t actually create any files.
I
> set my RAILS_ENV to ''production'', and it says
"Generated erb/rhtml
> output was created in app/views/** tree. But there are none there.
> Only .html files.
>
> What have I done wrong?
>
> Thanks
> Ed
>
> --
> Ed Howland
> http://greenprogrammer.blogspot.com
> _______________________________________________
> Masterview-users mailing list
> Masterview-users at rubyforge.org
> http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/masterview-users
>

Thanks,

That worked. I assume I can just rm -rf vendor/p;ugins/masterview for
production.

?

Ed

On 9/15/06, Jeff Barczewski <jeff.barczewski at gmail.com>
wrote:
> Ed,
>
> All you need to do is set your config setting
>
> config.generate_rhtml_files = true
>
> You can do this in config/masterview/settings.rb or one of the
> config/masterview/environments files.
>
> When you restart your app it will generate all of them on startup.
>
> Best,
>
> Jeff
>
> On 9/15/06, Ed Howland <ed.howland at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> > Now that we have completed development, we need to publish our site to
> > the hosting co. I need to get the actual ERB (.rhtml) files for that.
> > I tried rake mv:parse, but that didn''t actually create any
files. I
> > set my RAILS_ENV to ''production'', and it says
"Generated erb/rhtml
> > output was created in app/views/** tree. But there are none there.
> > Only .html files.
> >
> > What have I done wrong?
> >
> > Thanks
> > Ed
> >
> > --
> > Ed Howland
> > http://greenprogrammer.blogspot.com
> > _______________________________________________
> > Masterview-users mailing list
> > Masterview-users at rubyforge.org
> > http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/masterview-users
> >
> _______________________________________________
> Masterview-users mailing list
> Masterview-users at rubyforge.org
> http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/masterview-users
>

-- 
Ed Howland
http://greenprogrammer.blogspot.com

On 9/15/06, Ed Howland <ed.howland at gmail.com>
wrote:
> Thanks,
>
> That worked. I assume I can just rm -rf vendor/p;ugins/masterview for
> production.
>
Yes, once you have generated rhtml, then you don''t need masterview it
will function without anything. So you can simply remove the
vendor/plugins/masterview tree on your production server if you want.

I just run with MasterView on the production server the same way I do
in development, since it caches the same as rails does in production,
but if you gen the rhtml then you don''t really don''t need it.
Which
ever way works best for you :-) Ruby is all about choices :-)

Great. they don''t have the Mv gem installed.

Ed

On 9/15/06, Jeff Barczewski <jeff.barczewski at gmail.com>
wrote:
> On 9/15/06, Ed Howland <ed.howland at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Thanks,
> >
> > That worked. I assume I can just rm -rf vendor/p;ugins/masterview for
> > production.
> >
>
> Yes, once you have generated rhtml, then you don''t need masterview
it
> will function without anything. So you can simply remove the
> vendor/plugins/masterview tree on your production server if you want.
>
> I just run with MasterView on the production server the same way I do
> in development, since it caches the same as rails does in production,
> but if you gen the rhtml then you don''t really don''t need
it. Which
> ever way works best for you :-) Ruby is all about choices :-)
> _______________________________________________
> Masterview-users mailing list
> Masterview-users at rubyforge.org
> http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/masterview-users
>

-- 
Ed Howland
http://greenprogrammer.blogspot.com

>> they don''t have the Mv gem installed.
Ed - if you''ve pre-generated the .rthml files from masterview templates
on
your development system and pushed those up to your production server rails
installation directory, you shouldn''t need the MasterView plugin in
your
production configuration.

If you *do* want to run your production server directly from the MasterView
templates and you can''t install the gem (e.g., you''re on a
shared hosting
system), you just need to install a copy of the MasterView plugin code in a
directory that rails can load it from.  This procedure is described in the
installation documentation:

http://masterview.org/installation.html#install_plugin

To download and install manually, just get the current release of
"masterview_plugin" from rubyforge (masterview_plugin-0.2.5.tgz on the
Files
tab - you have to scroll down to find it, the organization of that downloads
page is by package rather than release, unfortunately) and unpack it into
the vendor/plugins directory.  From there, rails loads it automatically
(just as is does when the gem is installed).

(you can also put the files anywhere accessible and add the directory to
config.plugin_paths, e.g., do this into your rails
config/environments/production.rb configuration]

~ Deb

On 9/15/06, Deb Lewis <djlewis at acm.org> wrote:
> >> they don''t have the Mv gem installed.
>
> Ed - if you''ve pre-generated the .rthml files from masterview
templates on
> your development system and pushed those up to your production server rails
> installation directory, you shouldn''t need the MasterView plugin
in your
> production configuration.
>
> If you *do* want to run your production server directly from the MasterView
> templates and you can''t install the gem (e.g., you''re on
a shared hosting
> system), you just need to install a copy of the MasterView plugin code in a
> directory that rails can load it from.  This procedure is described in the
> installation documentation:
>
> http://masterview.org/installation.html#install_plugin
>
> To download and install manually, just get the current release of
> "masterview_plugin" from rubyforge (masterview_plugin-0.2.5.tgz
on the Files
> tab - you have to scroll down to find it, the organization of that
downloads
> page is by package rather than release, unfortunately) and unpack it into
> the vendor/plugins directory.  From there, rails loads it automatically
> (just as is does when the gem is installed).
>
> (you can also put the files anywhere accessible and add the directory to
> config.plugin_paths, e.g., do this into your rails
> config/environments/production.rb configuration]
>
> ~ Deb
Thanks, Deb. That is very useful information. I think I prefer to
generate the rhtml files and then delete the masterview plugin from
vendor/plugins. But its nice to know I can do it the other way as
well. I am not sure why we''d need to regenerate the .rhtml files on a
production server. We always TDD, create a release with all tests
passing, svn copy to a tag dir named for the release, export that and
publish. It seems we will have to do a few post-export tasks as well.
Maybe that is where Capistrano comes in?

We published it live on Friday. It went well. We used Bluehost.com
which has very good Rails support, and a responsive support staff. Two
things people should be aware of. Ruby is in /usr/bin/ruby, not
/usr/local/bin/ruby. So you need to edit dispatch.fcgi. Your have to
make a few other changes to .htaccess as well. I googled for those and
it worked. I''ll blog about the settings full later. All in all, it
went pretty smoothly.

Ed
-- 
Ed Howland
http://greenprogrammer.blogspot.com

Yeah, I always use /usr/bin/env ruby instead of a hardcoded path since
this seems to work well in accomodating where ever ruby is installed.
Glad to hear the deployment went well!

On 9/17/06, Ed Howland <ed.howland at gmail.com>
wrote:
>
> We published it live on Friday. It went well. We used Bluehost.com
> which has very good Rails support, and a responsive support staff. Two
> things people should be aware of. Ruby is in /usr/bin/ruby, not
> /usr/local/bin/ruby. So you need to edit dispatch.fcgi. Your have to
> make a few other changes to .htaccess as well. I googled for those and
> it worked. I''ll blog about the settings full later. All in all, it
> went pretty smoothly.
>

Ed - glad to hear your deployment went well!

Here''s a couple other thoughts on structuring plugins for
dev/deployment
that you might want to think about, since you indicated you''re using
Subversion for your VCS.  I''ll use MasterView as the example here, but
these
are actually general issues.

Consider using the SVN property svn:igore on the vendor/plugins directory in
your rails app.  In your development configuration, check out your rails app
in the usual fashion and then install the MasterView plugin (as gem or a
complete copy of the plugin, your preference).  The svn:ignore property on
vendor/plugins means only your own app code is managed in the repository,
which is usually what you want. 

Since you''re pregenerating the .rhtml view files and don''t
need mv in your
production installation, you''re now all set - the masterview plugin
isn''t
part of your app in the repository (and really shouldn''t be in any
case);
when you deploy to your production system from the release tag you just get
your own app files.

Keep in mind also that plugins don''t *have* to be installed in
vendor/plugins; you can append additional directories to the Rails plugin
load path by putting the following in your config/environment.rb or a
suitable config/environments/{env}.rb:

    config.plugin_paths <<
''/path/to/local/copy/of/masterview''

(I do this in my config/environments/development.rb for running my rails app
on development versions of masterview rather than a released version
that''s
used in production)

There''s also some very nice things you can do with svn:externals to
automate
the developer''s checkout mechanics, if it''s onerous to have
each developer
install masterview or other plugins that you''re using.  (Ordinarily
that
would be kind of a one-shot deal: install the gem + run the mv gem install
script).  This could also apply to automating a build testing setup or a
pregenerate-rhtml-from-release-tag-templates process, I expect.  The
technique is to set up a separate project which assembles the complete
working copy you want by using svn:externals references to pull in various
elements from the repository.  So a developer''s checkout config would
have
an svn:externals reference to your rails application and an additional
svn:externals to map in the vender/plugins/masterview directory from, say, a
vendors section in your repository where you archive the version of external
components you want to work with.

RE: Capistrano - I recently heard Mike Clark give his talk on rails
deployment with Capistrano and it''s definitely on my to-do list for
deploying my own sites.  Depending on what the post-export tasks you''re
doing are, that might fit in with Capistrano.  Or maybe you just need a few
rake tasks to automate your build/deploy procedure.

~ Deb