Rails - Apr 2005 - Evangelizing Ruby and Rails to Hosting Providers

Hey Folks,

Forgive me in advance if this is a discussion already had.

While I am going to be shortly setting up an account with TextDrive 
(and am happy to support that), my current primary host -- for my site, 
as well as customer sites -- is Dreamhost. Previous to that was Media 
Temple, but Dreamhost had a package and price that MT couldn''t match.

Already sent email to the DH folks trying to evangelize Ruby and Rails 
(they''re not, at least when I last checked, currently keeping the 
latest-and-greatest Ruby updates and don''t actively support Rails), but
was turned down. They said there just wasn''t enough interest yet. I 
countered with them, pointing to the developer buzz on both Ruby and 
Rails, as well as some other stats, but no dice.

Anyone had any success with other larger hosting providers in 
advocating the combo? Would love to be able to come up with some way 
that works to have R&R adopted and maintained in much the same way that 
PHP/MySQL is these days.

Thanks,

Anthony

I don''t think its your job to help out providers get their act
together.
Not enough interest is just another way of saying that they don''t care
enough and ignore a great opportunity to have an competitive edge over
other hosts even though they have been informed about the matter.

If they can''t offer the technology you need its probably a good time
to look for someone  who does.

There are three options you have: 

 * Install ruby and rails in your home dir, this will require that
they at least let you use fastcgi to get reasonable performance
 * Move to a rails friendly host like textdrive 
 * Get a (virtual-) server on which you have root and be your own provider. 


On Apr 3, 2005 11:52 AM, ThinkBigIdeas Anthony Baker
<anthony-ZEJemHc0OvwkEFqJWa3iIgC/G2K4zDHf@public.gmane.org>
wrote:
> Hey Folks,
> 
> Forgive me in advance if this is a discussion already had.
> 
> While I am going to be shortly setting up an account with TextDrive
> (and am happy to support that), my current primary host -- for my site,
> as well as customer sites -- is Dreamhost. Previous to that was Media
> Temple, but Dreamhost had a package and price that MT couldn''t
match.
> 
> Already sent email to the DH folks trying to evangelize Ruby and Rails
> (they''re not, at least when I last checked, currently keeping the
> latest-and-greatest Ruby updates and don''t actively support
Rails), but
> was turned down. They said there just wasn''t enough interest yet.
I
> countered with them, pointing to the developer buzz on both Ruby and
> Rails, as well as some other stats, but no dice.
> 
> Anyone had any success with other larger hosting providers in
> advocating the combo? Would love to be able to come up with some way
> that works to have R&R adopted and maintained in much the same way that
> PHP/MySQL is these days.
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Anthony
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Rails mailing list
> Rails-1W37MKcQCpIf0INCOvqR/iCwEArCW2h5@public.gmane.org
> http://lists.rubyonrails.org/mailman/listinfo/rails
> 

-- 
Tobi
http://www.snowdevil.ca - Snowboards that don''t suck
http://www.hieraki.org   - Open source book authoring
http://blog.leetsoft.com - Technical weblog

On Sun, 3 Apr 2005, Anthony Baker wrote:
> Anyone had any success with other larger hosting providers in advocating
the
> combo? Would love to be able to come up with some way that works to have
R&R
> adopted and maintained in much the same way that PHP/MySQL is these days.
I suggest going to a place that will give you a virtual machine, such as 
jvds.net.  Their answer when you ask for Rails to be installed will be 
something like "here''s your root password, have a nice day".

-- Matt
Nothing great was ever accomplished without _passion_

I thought this would be really simple but the docs do not seem to cover 
it. I need to create routing rules based on my subdomain.

I have wap.mydomain.com. When users access this URL, they should get 
redirected to a different controller. I have subclassed some of my 
controllers, so for instance I have WapListItemsController < 
ListItemsController.

This way I can have separate views/layouts and, if necessary, separate 
controller logic (though so far, the controller logic is just inherited 
from the parent).

Right now I have a default rule like:

  map.connect '''', :controller =>
''list_items'', :action => ''show''

I want something that would work like:

  map.connect subdomain(''wap''), :controller =>
''wap_list_items'', :action
=> ''show''

Any ideas?

Jeremy Huffman wrote:
> I thought this would be really simple but the docs do not seem to cover
> it. I need to create routing rules based on my subdomain.
> 
> I have wap.mydomain.com. When users access this URL, they should get
> redirected to a different controller. I have subclassed some of my
> controllers, so for instance I have WapListItemsController <
> ListItemsController.
> 
> This way I can have separate views/layouts and, if necessary, separate
> controller logic (though so far, the controller logic is just inherited
> from the parent).
> 
> Right now I have a default rule like:
> 
>  map.connect '''', :controller =>
''list_items'', :action => ''show''
> 
> I want something that would work like:
> 
>  map.connect subdomain(''wap''), :controller =>
''wap_list_items'', :action
> => ''show''
> 
> Any ideas?
Routes only map the URI path for now, so you can''t route based on
scheme, host, port, query string, etc.

You can use a before_filter to check whether you''re in a subdomain, but
by then the controller''s already chosen so they best you can do is set
something like @client_type = ''wap'' and check for it in your
actions.

You could also get fancy and delegate to a wap_* action if it exists:

before_filter :check_for_client_specific_action

protected
  attr_reader :client_type

  def check_for_client_specific_action
    # Determine client type from request subdomain.
    @client_type = @request.subdomains.first || ''www''

    # Change action on the fly if a specialized action exists.
    client_specific_action = "#{client_type}_#{action_name}"
    if action_methods.include?(client_specific_action)
      @params[''action''] = client_specific_action
    end
  end

public
  def show
    render_text "show me at #{@request.host}"
  end

  def wap_show
    render_text "wappinate me at #{@request.host}"
  end


A solution using Routes would be much nicer.

jeremy

Jeremy Kemper wrote:
>Jeremy Huffman wrote:
>  
>
>>I thought this would be really simple but the docs do not seem to cover
>>it. I need to create routing rules based on my subdomain.
>>
>>I have wap.mydomain.com. When users access this URL, they should get
>>redirected to a different controller. I have subclassed some of my
>>controllers, so for instance I have WapListItemsController <
>>ListItemsController.
>>
>>This way I can have separate views/layouts and, if necessary, separate
>>controller logic (though so far, the controller logic is just inherited
>>from the parent).
>>
>>Right now I have a default rule like:
>>
>> map.connect '''', :controller =>
''list_items'', :action => ''show''
>>
>>I want something that would work like:
>>
>> map.connect subdomain(''wap''), :controller =>
''wap_list_items'', :action
>>=> ''show''
>>
>>Any ideas?
>>    
>>
>
>Routes only map the URI path for now, so you can''t route based on
>scheme, host, port, query string, etc.
>
>You can use a before_filter to check whether you''re in a subdomain,
but
>by then the controller''s already chosen so they best you can do is
set
>something like @client_type = ''wap'' and check for it in
your actions.
>
>You could also get fancy and delegate to a wap_* action if it exists:
>
>before_filter :check_for_client_specific_action
>
>protected
>  attr_reader :client_type
>
>  def check_for_client_specific_action
>    # Determine client type from request subdomain.
>    @client_type = @request.subdomains.first || ''www''
>
>    # Change action on the fly if a specialized action exists.
>    client_specific_action = "#{client_type}_#{action_name}"
>    if action_methods.include?(client_specific_action)
>      @params[''action''] = client_specific_action
>    end
>  end
>
>public
>  def show
>    render_text "show me at #{@request.host}"
>  end
>
>  def wap_show
>    render_text "wappinate me at #{@request.host}"
>  end
>
>
>A solution using Routes would be much nicer.
>
>  
>
Yeah, I agree. I pretty much am convinced that I need different 
controllers though. I''m subclassing my controller - this way, I can 
reuse my existing action''s code but will automatically render different
views. If I need to override the actions I can, but I expect I won''t 
have to - I just change the views a lot (XHTML Basic only, reduced 
amounts of info & links displayed, no images, headers, etc.)

Right now, this is what I''m doing:

class ListItemsController < ApplicationController
    before_filter :redirect_wap
    before_filter :login_required

    def redirect_wap
      if @request.host[0,3] == ''wap''
             unless self.is_a? WapListItemsController
                 redirect_to :controller =>
''wap_list_items''
            end
        end
    end
....

For some reason, I cannot get @request.subdomains to return me anything 
even though its clearly just splitting host and I can read that fine. 
But nevermind that bit for now. The only part I really don''t like here 
is that I''m doing a redirect, which results in an extra roundtrip on an
extremely bandwidth limited device. What I really need is to transfer to 
the other controller on the server-side. Is this at least possible?

Jeremy Huffman wrote:
> Yeah, I agree. I pretty much am convinced that I need different
> controllers though. I''m subclassing my controller - this way, I
can
> reuse my existing action''s code but will automatically render
different
> views. If I need to override the actions I can, but I expect I
won''t
> have to - I just change the views a lot (XHTML Basic only, reduced
> amounts of info & links displayed, no images, headers, etc.)
You could mod_rewrite the subdomain into your URL path, thus making it
available to Routes.

jeremy

Jeremy Kemper wrote:
>Jeremy Huffman wrote:
>  
>
>>Yeah, I agree. I pretty much am convinced that I need different
>>controllers though. I''m subclassing my controller - this way, I
can
>>reuse my existing action''s code but will automatically render
different
>>views. If I need to override the actions I can, but I expect I
won''t
>>have to - I just change the views a lot (XHTML Basic only, reduced
>>amounts of info & links displayed, no images, headers, etc.)
>>    
>>
>
>You could mod_rewrite the subdomain into your URL path, thus making it
>available to Routes.
>  
>
Good hack, but not everyone uses apache (I don''t for development right 
now) and I think we should be able to handle this in rails. I suppose 
though, this is the point where I can put up a patch or shutup? :) 
Probably this wouldn''t be that hard. I looked at some of the rails code
trying to answer this question myself and it doesn''t look like black 
magic, just something I''d need to spend a bit of time on.

Thanks for the input.