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The Retrospective Trifecta

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We are proud to announce that we have released the results for the 2014 Ruby on Rails Hosting Survey! This year was an interesting challenge for us because we decided to display the results from previous years along with this year’s data.

How did we do that, you may ask? Charts! If a question was asked in a previous year, the viewer may switch the active color of the chart to highlight the data for that specific year. Neat-o!

We’ve made comments about what has changed throughout the years, but we want you to play around with the data and compare.

Thank you to everyone who participated this year!

Take a look at the Ruby on Rails Hosting Survey 2014.

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Our team welcomed Screaming Circuits to our list of fantastic clients. Screaming Circuits is an Oregon-based manufacturer of quick-turn prototype and shortrun production pc board assembly market.

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Using our template we created last year for the Bagdad, we implemented a new theme and design for the Mission Theater’s showings and pages.

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There has been a lot of talk lately about canonical URLs and how Google and other search engines would really prefer if you would use them. So, what is a canonical URL and why should you use them?

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What we’re talking about

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It’s time to take the pulse of the Ruby on Rails hosting ecosystem again.

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An overview of how we're using Capybara Webkit to mock Chargify for a Ruby on Rails application.

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In my last article I detailed how to run PHP through a Rack server. This works fairly well until you try to sign into the Wordpress admin section.

The problem is that Wordpress stores site URLs in the database and it will use these for some redirections. Luckily, with a few Rake tasks you can painlessly override them.

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We work primarily in Ruby on Rails, but every once and a while a client will need us to fix a critical bug in an existing PHP/Wordpress app that is slated to be deprecated.

We use Pow on our development machines. This is great for developing Rails applications but it does't play so well with other stacks that require port 80 to run.

There are some instructions out on the web that show you how to use Apache in conjunction with Pow so that both apps can be served simultaneously. This seemed like a little too much overhead, so I started poking around for a solution.

Did you know that PHP comes with an embedded web server? Yup, it's built in as of PHP 5.4 and OS X Mavericks comes with it pre-installed. If you're looking for a newer version, you can install 5.5 using homebrew-php.

Now that we don't need Apache to run PHP, we'll need something to proxy requests back to our embedded server. For this, I used Rack.

I setup a simple Gemfile with the following gems:

gem 'rack'
gem 'rack-legacy'

Then it's time to create our rackup file. Create a file titled config.ru and add the following:

require 'rubygems'
require 'bundler'

Bundler.setup

require 'rack'
require 'rack-legacy'

use Rack::ShowExceptions
use Rack::Legacy::Index
use Rack::Legacy::Php
run Rack::File.new Dir.getwd

That's it! Place this file into the root of your PHP project and you should be able to call rackup from the terminal to start the Rack server. By default this will be at http://0.0.0.0:9292.

There is one caveat though. At this time, Rack Legacy, will only respond to requests if it thinks that it's a valid PHP file.

From the Rack Legacy library this is called before a request is proxied:

def valid? path
    return false unless path =~ /\.php/

    path = path[1..-1] if path =~ /^\//
    path = path.split('.php', 2)[0] + '.php'
    path = ::File.expand_path path, @public_dir
    ::File.file? path
end

In our case this wasn't working for us because of the way that pretty URLs were being handled by Wordpress. In order to get around that, I monkey-patched Rack Legacy to simply pass all requests back to PHP.

Here is what I added to the config.ru file to make this happen:

class Rack::Legacy::Php
    def valid? path
        return true
    end
end

With that change, the Wordpress site was working as expected.

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