cookies and hosts / domains

I have been struggling for weeks with a problem of users being logged in to mysite.com, but not en.mysite.com and es.mysite.com. I posted on Ruby Groups and even tried to hire someone to do the work... but to no avail.
Finally I think I cracked it today.

Two things. First, for some reason doing this didn't work:

  if RAILS_ENV == 'production'
    config.action_controller.session = {
      :session_key => '_my_session',
      :session_domain => '.mysite.com',
      :secret      => 'xxx'
    }
  else
    config.action_controller.session = {
      :session_key => '_my_session',
      :session_domain => '.mysite.local',
     :secret      => 'xxy'
    }
  end

So, I substituted this into each environment file:

config.after_initialize do
  ActionController::CgiRequest::DEFAULT_SESSION_OPTIONS[:session_domain] = '.mysite.local'
end

That got my session's having the correct domain set (.mysite.com) meaning that the session was saved across subdomains.

Cookies

But then I encountered a second problem. Cookies.
After switching to hide and seek / show and tell methods to enable me to page cache even pages that had logged in status all over them (more on this in another post) I needed some user info in a cookie. But my cookies were tied to the subdomain!
I was setting the cookies like this:

      cookies[:current_user] = {
        :cart_items_count => cart_items_count,
        :nothing => 1
      }.to_json

I thought, ok I just need to add the domain in:

      cookies[:current_user] = {
        :cart_items_count => cart_items_count,
        :nothing => 1,
        :domain => ActionController::CgiRequest::DEFAULT_SESSION_OPTIONS[:session_domain]
      }.to_json

No...this didn't work. Everything was being chucked into the cookies 'value' and not the domain field (same happened if I added in an expires_at key). What was going on?
Aha! It is the json-izing.

So, I moved that out to a seperate variable:

      value = {:cart_items_count => cart_items_count, :nothing => 1}.to_json
      cookies.delete :login, :domain => ActionController::CgiRequest::DEFAULT_SESSION_OPTIONS[:session_domain]
      cookies[:current_user] = {
        :value => value,
        :domain => ActionController::CgiRequest::DEFAULT_SESSION_OPTIONS[:session_domain]
      }

Now my cookies had the proper domain info and the value was still proper json. And now my users are logged in across sub domains!

backgroundrb by hostname

I love backgroundrb - the way to run scheduled tasks and async workers. BUT on my setup I wanted to run certain backgroundrb tasks on one machine and certain ones on another (for memory reasons and also for testing).

I couldn't find something that did that so I forked backgroundrb into my own repository on GitHub. You can find it here.

You can now have a config file like this:

# A Sample YAML configuration file
---
:backgroundrb:
  :ip: 0.0.0.0 #ip on which backgroundrb server is running
  :port: 11006 #port on which backgroundrb server is running
  :environment: production # rails environment loaded, defaults to development
  :debug_log: true # whether to print debug logs to a seperate worker, defaults to true
  :log: foreground # will print log messages to STDOUT, defaults to seperate log worker
  # :result_storage: memcache # store results in a mecache cluster, you also need to specify location of your memcache clusters in next section
  :persistent_disabled: true # turn this off if your application doesn't use backgroundrb's persistent/enqueued tasks system
  :persistent_delay: 10 # the time (seconds) between each time backgroundrb checks the database for enqueued tasks
  :per_environment: true

# You specify your worker schedules here
:whatever.local:
    :backgroundrb: 
        :environment: test
    :schedules:
      :test_worker: # worker name
        :test: #worker method
          :trigger_args: */5 * * * * * * #worker schedule
          :data: whatever

:phils-mac-pro.local:
    :backgroundrb: 
        :environment: development
    :schedules:
      :test_worker: # worker name
        :test: #worker method
          :trigger_args: */5 * * * * * * #worker schedule
          :data: phil

You can launch backgroundrb with a specific hostname like this:

./script/backgroundrb --hostname=whatever.local

I've created Capistrano tasks that fire up an instance on 2 servers and now they act differently based on hostname.

Sweet!

Generating sitemaps and xml catalogues

One of the things we have to do at FilmAmora is generate a catalogue of our films. This is used in a few ways, but principally to drive our recommendations system.

I stumbled across this great blog entry:
Generating-Sitemaps-With-Rails that not only tells you a very nice way of generating sitemaps but also gave us great ideas for using the same technique to generate our catalogues.

Awesome!

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!

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

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

Rails and eTags

In the never ending search for speed I've been doing a lot of stuff with 304 Conditional get's. Here is a good article about etags - which is a vital component to it!


Rails-ETags