Ruby Enterprise 1.8.7-2010.02 Packages for Ubuntu Hardy & Lucid 16 Jun 10

We’ve built new 32 & 64bit Ruby Enterprise 1.8.7-2010.02 packages for Ubuntu Hardy and Lucid. The 2010.02 release of Ruby EE includes a number of backported fixes for critical bugs in Ruby 1.8.7p249 and we recommend users currently using our 2010.01 packages upgrade immediately.

For further information on using these packages see the release announcement for our Ruby EE 2010.01 packages.

Ubuntu 10.04 LTS “Lucid” now available 8 Jun 10

Available from today, you can now choose either Ubuntu Hardy or Lucid as the base OS when building new Brightboxes.

Ubuntu Lucid is the latest Long Term Support (LTS) version of Ubuntu with security fixes provided until April 2015. It brings a whole bunch of upgrades such as Ruby 1.8.7, Monit 5, Apache 2.2.14 and new packages like CouchDB, Sphinx, Chef, RabbitMQ, MongoDB, ejabberd and many more.

We’ve treated it to the usual Brightbox Ruby deployment tune-up, including our Ruby Enterprise Edition 1.8.7-2010.01 packages. Updated Phusion Passenger packages are now available on our newly Lucid-enabled apt repository.

When buying a new Brightbox, you’ll see a combo box that you can use to select Lucid (Hardy is still currently the default). Upgrading from Hardy to Lucid isn’t really viable due to the way Hardy boxes handle kernels, so you’ll either need to request a re-image (which involves wiping your box, so make backups!) or buy a new box and move your apps to it.

Ruby Enterprise 1.8.7-2010.01 Packages for Ubuntu Hardy & Lucid 17 May 10

We’ve built  new 32bit and 64bit Ruby Enterprise 1.8.7-2010.01 packages for Ubuntu Hardy and Lucid. The new packages are now the default on new Lucid beta boxes. For Hardy, as before these packages are quite a major change from the default Hardy Ruby interpreter,which is 1.8.6, so we recommend you test thoroughly before putting it into production.

As with our other Ruby EE packages, they upgrade (i.e replace) the standard 1.8 Ruby installation. This means all your gems stay the same, and everything on your system immediately starts using them (Phusion’s own Ubuntu packages do not work like this).

These packages are also the best way to get Ruby 1.8.7 on Hardy, which you’ll need if you’re playing with Rails 3.

If you’re on a Hardy based Brightbox, just create or edit /etc/apt/sources.list.d/brightbox-rubyee.list to contain the rubyee-testing component like so:

deb http://apt.brightbox.net/ hardy rubyee-testing

If you’re on one of our Lucid beta boxes provisioned before today, simply create /etc/apt/sources.list.d/brightbox-rubyee.list and add the rubyee component:

deb http://apt.brightbox.net/ lucid rubyee

Finally, update and upgrade libruby1.8:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install libruby1.8 irb1.8 libopenssl-ruby1.8 libreadline-ruby1.8 rdoc1.8 ruby1.8

If you’re not on a Brightbox, see the instructions on our wiki first. The wiki also documents how to revert back to the old packages.

Load Balancing with Stomp and ActiveMessaging 14 Apr 10

Inevitably with modern distributed software architecture you’re going to end up talking to a message queue at some point. We’ve been using ActiveMQ as the message broker, STOMP as the message protocol of choice and the ActiveMessaging gem so that we can talk to the message broker from Rails.

ActiveMessaging is a great piece of code, but at first glance it appears to have a couple of wrinkles

• The standard configuration doesn’t support load balancing (so that you can talk to another broker if your normal one isn’t responding).
• The queues and topics you want to speak to are defined at class level – which is a problem if you want the queues to be dynamically defined based upon data values.

But thanks to Ruby, YAML and a bit of lateral thinking you can get around these issues.

ActiveMessaging uses the Stomp Gem under the hood, and that can do load balancing by itself. So all you have to do is get ActiveMessaging to pass the relevant incantations down to the Stomp Gem – intact. And you do that with a bit of fancy YAML. The trick is to add your host configurations to the login configuration entry in hash format like this:

 production:
    adapter: stomp
    login:
      :randomize: true
      :hosts:
      - :login: myloginid1
        :passcode: mypassword1
        :host: broker-host-1.somedomain.co.uk
      - :login: myloginid2
        :passcode: mypassword2
        :host: broker-host-2.somedomain.co.uk

The Stomp Connection class checks login to see if it is a hash and if it is uses that in preference to anything else. You can setup anything Stomp understands within that Hash. Check the class code for details.

The beauty of this approach is that it is entirely in the configuration. Your Rails code doesn’t need to know about it. The reconnection happens automatically in the background.

I’ve used an observer class within Rails to handle the message sending. It watches a model and sends messages when stuff is created and updated – nicely separating the concerns. But I wanted to talk to different queues depending upon what was in the model. So the standard ActiveMessaging::MessageSender approach didn’t seem appropriate.

After a bit of digging around it turns out that you can get hold of the broker connection directly rather than going via the Gateway.

client = ActiveMessaging::Gateway.connection

Then you can send to any queue you like, not just the ones defined up front in messaging.rb:

client.send("/queue/#{some_variable}", body, headers)

This is a lower level connection and you lose the filter chains and some error checking. However if you need it, it’s there.

Timezones on your Brightbox 6 Apr 10

You may have thought the time is wrong on your server. Well, it isn’t really, it is just that we prefer to set the default time on Brightboxes to Coordinated Universal Time (UTC).

This is generally considered to be best practice where ever a server is geographically located, however, it may  cause a problem if you are hosting a  geographically specific web application.

If your web application requires a different time-zone such as CET, BST or PST, or Daylight Saving Time is giving you a headache,  take a look at our Wiki page for a timely introduction to the subject of time-zones on Brightboxes.

Passenger 2.2.11 packages for Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy 5 Mar 10

The last Passenger release, 2.2.10, has a bug that causes Apache to freeze when used under moderate load (Phusion say high load but we’ve seen it on quite moderate conditions).  We recommend that anyone using Passenger 2.2.10 upgrade to 2.2.11 asap.  Ubuntu Hardy packages are now available in our repository.

Passenger 2.2.10 packages for Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy 26 Feb 10

Phusion released Passenger 2.2.10 this week, fixing some bundler compatibility bugs and a file descriptor bug that could lead to “mysterious crashes”.

We’ve built our Ubuntu Hardy packages for i386 and AMD64 architectures which are now available from the Brightbox apt repository.  We’ve also upgraded our librack-ruby packages to 1.1.0.

Full Text Indexing in Ruby with Xapian Fu 1 Feb 10

I’ve just properly announced my Ruby full text indexing library, Xapian Fu, on my personal blog.  It’s a Ruby interface to Xapian, an open source search engine Library.  Xapian Fu basically gives you a Hash interface to Xapian – so you get a persistent Hash with full text indexing built in.

For example:

  require 'xapian-fu'
  include XapianFu
  db = XapianDb.new(:dir => 'example.db', :create => true,
                    :store => [:title, :year])
  db << { :title => 'Brokeback Mountain', :year => 2005 }
  db << { :title => 'Cold Mountain', :year => 2004 }
  db << { :title => 'Yes Man', :year => 2008 }
  db.flush
  db.search("mountain").each do |match|
    puts match.values[:title]
  end

The full announcement is here, github project here and rdoc here.  Hope you find it useful!

Brightbox Gem v2.3.6 released 27 Jan 10

Today I’m pleased to announce a new revision of the Brightbox Deployment Gem, version 2.3.6. This release fixes some of the issues reported to us by our users, along with a few extra features.

The documentation on the wiki has been updated with the new fixes and features. If you have any tips or find any errors just let us know.

NEW FEATURES

Apt Package Dependencies

Just as you can currently define gems your application relies on and have them automatically installed onto your servers, you can now do the same with apt packages. Define them in your deploy.rb and they’ll be installed before installing your required rubygems, which means you can use it to install apt packages that gems depend on. As an example, the nokogiri gem depends on a couple of apt packages.

depend :remote, :apt, "libxml2-dev"
depend :remote, :apt, "libxslt1-dev"
depend :remote, :gem, "nokogiri", ">= 0"

Intermediate SSL Certificates

Support for Intermediate SSL Certificates in Apache has been added, meaning you no longer need to manually edit the Apache config files directly. Just add one line to your deploy.rb and the gem now takes care of updating the Apache config for you. An example SSL configuration:

set :ssl_certificate, "my_cert.pem"
set :ssl_key, "my_cert.key"
set :ssl_intermediate, "intermediate.crt"

See the wiki page for Adding SSL Support to Apache for more information.

Deploy.local.rb

A common issue we’ve seen with is setting the deploy password. If you put it in deploy.rb, then it inevitably ends up in your source control repository, which is a bad idea. A workaround we’ve suggested in the past is to have a deploy.local.rb file, which isn’t tracked by source control, and load that from within your deploy.rb file. This allows you to have the password (or any other sensitive settings) defined, but kept outside your source control.

As part of this release, the gem now has official support for a deploy.local.rb file. If it exists, the gem will load it in for you.

For more information see the Advanced Gem Settings page on the wiki.

Disable (re)generating webserver config

If you’ve made manual changes to your webserver (apache or nginx) configuration, then you don’t want an accidental deploy:setup to overwrite your configs. Up until now you just had to avoid running the command, but now there’s a setting to disable it for you.

set :generate_webserver_config, false

FIXES AND ENHANCEMENTS

• Max Age setting now accepts a number as well as a string
• deploy:initial reloads Apache so the new config is loaded

Passenger 2.2.9 packages for Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy 8 Jan 10

The Phusion team released Passenger 2.2.9 today, which adds support for Rails 3, the GEM bundler, and fixes a couple of bugs.  As usual Brightbox are providing Ubuntu Hardy packages for i386 and AMD64 architectures, available now from the Brightbox apt repository.

This package won’t actually support Rails 3 just yet though as we’ve yet to package and test the librack 1.1.0, which Rails 3 depends on.  We’re working on it now and once we’re happy with it we’ll add new packages to our repository as usual.