Friday 13 February 2009

ec2onrails EU

Well, necessity is the mother of invention. We needed new FilmAmora servers to deal with the increasing load. I also wanted to move to EU-based EC2 instances.
That meant rolling our own because I believe there are no publicly available ec2onrails instances that run in the eu-west region.

This was not as easy as I would have liked, so here's a little step by step.

1. Go to Alestic and get the id of the proper eu instance. (At this writing it is ami-ac032bd8)

2. Fire up an instance of this. I use Elastic Fox and you need to set the region to europe then choose this instance.

3. copy your pem's into the instance:
scp -i IDENTITY {cert,pk}-*.pem root@HOSTNAME:/mnt/


4. ssh into the instance
ssh -i IDENTITY root@HOSTNAME


5. Get the build script
wget http://ec2ubuntu-build-ami.notlong.com


6. update so you can get git
apt-get update && apt-get upgrade -y


7. get git
apt-get install git-core


8. get ec2onrails and use the latest branch
git clone git://github.com/pauldowman/ec2onrails.git
cd ec2onrails
git checkout --track -b 0.9.9.1 origin/0.9.9.1


9. Run the build script!
 bash ec2ubuntu-build-ami \
--script /root/ec2onrails/server/build-ec2onrails.sh \
--user YOUR_ACCOUNT_NUMBER \
--access-key YOUR_ACCESS_KEY \
--secret-key YOUR_SECRET_KEY \
--bucket BUKCET_NAME \
--prefix PREFIX \
--location EU


Your account number is the 12 digit number from your amazon access information page.

10. Register the instance
ec2-register bucket/manifest.xml --region eu-west-1


That's it!
You should now be able to go to Elastic Fox and launch and instance of this that will be in Europe!

Wednesday 11 February 2009

DropDown menu for Blueprint tabbed menus

I love blueprint css! And I also love the tabs menu plugin for it. But, we neede drop down menus on FilmAmora. So I wrote a little extension that gives you that. It's not perfect, but, it works for now.

Find it here:
Blueprint_dd

Friday 6 February 2009

BackgroundRb and Synchronous calls

BackgroundRb lets you also call the workers synchronously. This is quite neat as you can use it as a form of pseudo-proxy and all other kinds of goodies.
But, the documentation is lacking, so I am posting this for all you frustrated Googlers out there. Here is what you need to do.

class SampleWorker < BackgrounDRb::MetaWorker
set_worker_name :sample_worker

def create(args = nil)
# this method is called, when worker is loaded for the first time
end

def test_me args
puts "test_me 1 (puts)"
logger.debug("test_me hit (log)")
return "of course it works"
end
end


Now, the BackgroundRb site tells you to call this like so to get a response back:

MiddleMan.worker(:sample_worker).test_me(:arg => "1")


This, in fact, won't work.

You need to do this:

MiddleMan.worker(:sample_worker).test_me({:arg => "1"}, true)


The second parameter (and make sure you put {} around your first set of args) is some freaky boolean to say, "no, seriously, I want a result back". Otherwise you get nil.

Bonus Tip!
When you define a method in a worker it HAS to accept arguments.
This won't work:
def test_me
end


This will:

def test_me(something = 1)
end