If you’re using Ruby on Rails, you’ll likely use the will_paginate plugin. If you use Twitter’s Bootstrap CSS framework as well, you’ll notice that the pagination is all messed up. This gist fixes it:

  # application_helper.rb
  # https://gist.github.com/1205828
  # Based on https://gist.github.com/1182136
  class BootstrapLinkRenderer < ::WillPaginate::ViewHelpers::LinkRenderer
    protected
 
    def html_container(html)
      tag :div, tag(:ul, html), container_attributes
    end
 
    def page_number(page)
      tag :li, link(page, page, :rel => rel_value(page)), :class => ('active' if page == current_page)
    end
 
    def gap
      tag :li, link(super, '#'), :class => 'disabled'
    end
 
    def previous_or_next_page(page, text, classname)
      tag :li, link(text, page || '#'), :class => [classname[0..3], classname, ('disabled' unless page)].join(' ')
    end
  end
 
  def page_navigation_links(pages)
    will_paginate(pages, :class => 'pagination', :inner_window => 2, :outer_window => 0, :renderer => BootstrapLinkRenderer, :previous_label => '&larr;'.html_safe, :next_label => '&rarr;'.html_safe)
  end

This serves as a reminder for me on getting Ruby on Rails 3.1.3 running on Ubuntu (tested on 10.01 LTS).

Install git using apt-get:

sudo apt-get install git-svn

Install build dependencies:

sudo apt-get install gcc g++ build-essential libssl-dev libreadline5-dev zlib1g-dev linux-headers-generic libsqlite3-dev

Install rvm (Ruby Version Manager)

bash -s stable < <(curl -s https://raw.github.com/wayneeseguin/rvm/master/binscripts/rvm-installer )

Put RVM into .bash_rc file so that you can run it easily:

echo '[[ -s "$HOME/.rvm/scripts/rvm" ]] && . "$HOME/.rvm/scripts/rvm" # Load RVM function' >> ~/.bash_rc

Reload bash settings:

source ~/.bash_rc

That should install rvm. Now you can use it to install Ruby:

rvm install 1.9.2

Make sure to switch into the correct version of Ruby:

rvm use 1.9.2

Install Rails:

gem install rails

This takes a while….

Install Apache:

sudo apt-get install apache2

Install Phusion Passenger:

gem install passenger

passenger-install-apache2-module

Follow the instructions on screen.

Setup Apache virtual hosting the way you normally do. Make the DocumentRoot the rails public directory.

<VirtualHost *:80>
        ServerName ec2-107-21-154-173.compute-1.amazonaws.com
        RailsEnv production
        DocumentRoot /home/ubuntu/depot/public
        <Directory /home/ubuntu/depot/public>
                Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews
                AllowOverride All
                Order allow,deny
                allow from all
        </Directory>
 
</VirtualHost>

When deploying an app make sure to run bundle install to make sure all the dependencies are installed. This includes mysql, etc.

Rails 3.1 needs a Javascript runtime.

Add this to your gemfile:

gem 'execjs'
gem 'therubyracer'

Run:

bundle install

Make sure to setup your DB using:

rake db:setup RAILS_ENV="production"

Restart apache:

sudo service apache2 restart

Load your browser and visit the site. Hopefully it works, if it doesn’t, check logs/production.log and trace from there.

Asset Pipeline Gotchas

The new asset pipeline in Rails may cause your app to fail.

When you deploy an app, make sure that you precompile the assets using:

bundle exec rake assets:precompile

If you are including css files that are not in your application.css manifest, you need to manually include them in your config/environments/production.rb:

config.assets.precompile += ['960.css']

Note: After recompiling assets you will need to restart your rails app. Do this either by restarting apache or creating/modifying “tmp/restart.txt” in your rails app. Passenger will look at the timestamp for restart.txt and restart rails accordingly.

I know I’ll forget this because I only have to edit runlevel services once in a blue moon. Use a tool called rcconf. You may have to install it using apt-get.

I figure I would write this because I searched around for a suitable solution and it’s quite frustrating to find. VBulletin (the company) runs a very tight community and generally don’t help people who want to hack or extend the software. In my case, I am integrating VBulletin into a client’s custom application and trying to get single sign on to work. Do a search and you’ll find VBulletin telling people who have asked the same question “we won’t help you. Go to vbulletin.org.” When you do get to vbulletin.org, you can’t see any code because you’re not a licensed user. Very frustrating.

So…here it is.

VBulletin stores two cookie vars that can be used for single sign on:

• bb_userid – look in the ‘user’ table, it is the field ‘userid’
• bb_password – md5(user.password . COOKIE_SALT)

When a user visits the forum, it can login based on the above.

Once you authenticate that the user can login in your app, read the user row from the vbulletin database. Take the password (which is already hashed) and concatenate the COOKIE_SALT constant to it. You can find COOKIE_SALT defined in /includes/functions.php. You then md5 hash this string and set the cookie as bb_password.

When setting your cookie, remember to set the domain to one that vbulletin can read. If you’re using different subdomains (e.g.   www.leonardteo.com for the main app and forums.leonardteo.com for the forums) simply set the domain to “.leonardteo.com”. In VBulletin, you’ll want to go into the admincp and change the cookie domain to the same.

By setting these two cookies, you should be able to login with your app and it will automatically login to VBulletin as well.

Logout
Make sure you set the logout routine as well. Your logout routine needs to clear three cookies:

• bb_userid
• bb_password
• bb_sessionhash

Enjoy.

I find myself constantly doing this with files that some OS’s and programs spew all over a directory structure. E.g. .DS_Store, .svn, etc.

find . -name "filename" -exec rm -rf {} \;