It turns out that  Mongoid dependencies starting from 3.x require you to use Ruby 1.9.3  while Webbynode only has 1.9.2 when creating a standard RAPP instance.

The solution isn’t as hard as it seems. Most of the stress I experienced was tracing the problem and finding out that there wasn’t anything on the web to directly point you to a solution.

So instead of searching for “Ruby 1.9.3 on Webbynode”, I tried researching for “RVM on Webbynode” and found  this article by Andre Honsberg, which pointed me in the right direction.

To make things simpler for the common Webbynode deployer, here are are the steps one needs to take to make Ruby 1.9.3 (and future rubies) work on your webby.

RVM is the key.

The Ruby Version Manager (RVM) is clearly the best way to manage multiple rubies in development and can make your deployments more flexible when you deal with many ruby projects using varying ruby versions.

Note My web server preference is Nginx + Passenger and the following steps are for that stack.

First, get on your webby’s shell using the CLI and install RVM.

This will download and run the RVM installation and create the .rvm folder and sources within your home directory (/var/rapp).

Next, add a reference in your .bashrc to the RVM working directory

Now re-initialize your bash terminal session

To test if the everything is all fine, type the following command and check if you get rvm is a function.

Installing Ruby with RVM.

All good? Awesome. Now we can install our ruby.

This installs 1.9.3 in your .rvm directory. You may want to download other rubies which will all be found in .rvm for you to manage and use as you want.

Now let’s make 1.9.3 our default ruby.

Let’s check our default ruby now by running it with the -v directive.

Slow clap.

Note Anytime you want to see a list of rubies installed, you can issue the rvm list command where you’ll also see the current and default ruby version. Incidentally, anytime you want to revert to the system ruby version you can issue the rvm use system command.

Making Nginx use your new ruby version.

So now that we’ve got Ruby 1.9.3 on the web by, we’ll want to make Nginx use it for our app.

Let’s start by editing nginx.conf.

Look for the passenger_ruby directive which will likely be defined to point to the system ruby wrapper.

replace this line with

This will direct Nginx to start using your new ruby when Nginx next starts.

Note I used patch 327 of Ruby which was the latest one at the time I tried this.

Just to make sure my wrappers are properly formed, I issue the below command to update RVM and ask it to re-generate the wrappers.

Restart Nginx and resume fighting the good fight.

Verifying the version

To confirm that we’re using the new ruby version, from the webbynode CLI:

Thanks to Andre Honsberg/ @andrehonsberg for the great article on installing RVM on Ubuntu.

In the future, we will be supporting sender masking so we can include your company’s name to appear to your consumer. Incoming messages will also be available soon so you can engage with your customers.

Firefly API is complete with documentation which is included in the website upon sign-up. If you have any concerns, comments or feedback, please feel free to contact Jason Torres. Currently, Firefly API is at beta and an invite-only service. Hurry up so you can be a part of our beta users by requesting an invite via the Firefly API website.

The only drawback is that the version installed by the native recipe is 1.6.5. This posed a problem when we started using Alex Reisner’s Geocoder gem with MongoDB’s geospatial methods, particularly $nearSphere.

To make a long story short, the 1.6.5 and earlier versions are broken as far as geospatial is concerned and the only fix is to update mongodb on your webby.

Remove mongodb from your addons

The first thing that needs to be done is to remove the mongodb addon from your webby. No need to worry since all your DBs will remain intact.

From your local terminal:

This is required so the deploy script doesn’t re-install the old version of MongoDB the next time you do a wn push.

Edit your project, commit your changes, and perform a normal webbynode deploy using the CLI.

Webbynode should then proceed to remove the currently installed MongoDB package.

Configure the Ubuntu Package Management System (APT)

Go into your webby’s shell using the webbynode CLI

APT requires all packages to be signed with GPG keys. On the command line, import the 10gen public GPG Key:

Edit /etc/apt/sources.list and add the following to add the 10gen repository:

Now issue the following command to update the package manager with the 10gen  repository:

Install Packages

Issue the following command which will install the latest stable version of MongoDB:

Allow it to replace any previous MongoDB versions installed. That’s it!

The latest stable version of MongoDB should now be installed on your webby as a service.

Installation procedure was derived from http://docs.mongodb.org/manual/tutorial/install-mongodb-on-debian-or-ubuntu-linux/ 

We were also fortunate to have Erik Lacson from Devex at the Proudcloud HQ as well during this edition of Proudcloud Talks. Cheers mate.

Check out Andrei’s presentation deck below.

reddotrubyconf was held on April 22 and 23, 2011, at the Singapore Management University. Being the south east asian region’s first ever Ruby conference and so close to home, Jason Torres and I joined a large group of PhRUG members and flew to Singapore.

As anticipated, the conference had a more intimate attendee size which gave everybody a high value experience as we all got the chance to meet many rubyists and rub elbows with some industry rockstars like Ruby creator Yukihiro Matz, the Pickaxe Book author Dave Thomas, Github co-founder Tom Preston-Werner, and Envylabs founder Greg Pollack.

Props go out to the organizers and their fantastic work, Jason Ong, Andy Croll, and the Pivotal Labs team led by Carl Coryell-Martin.

Ruby creator Yukihiro Matz

Awesome talks from the first day were had by all as Matz gave the ‘keynote’ and Dave Thomas explained how Ruby really evolved from the best of many languages. Ian Mcfarland of Pivotal labs gave a talk about Agile the Pivotal Way (which I swear I’ve seen more times than I really need to).

The original pragmatic programmer Dave Thomas explaining why he thinks Ruby is an amalgam of the best of other programming langauges.

That night, we all trooped to the Pigeonhole for PechaKucha where Manila based Steven Talcott-Smith gave a talk on his work-in-progress unified equation offered as a middle ground project estimation method. He places it somewhere between the from-the-hip approach and a painfully thorough story creation process.

The most energetic and (I believe) the most meaningful talk of the night was from pinoy rubyist Bryan Bibat. Bryan gave a compelling (ahem… love your own fellas) account of his continuing adventures evangelizing Ruby in a 3rd world country like the Philippines. Bryan sure made us pinoy rubyists proud that night.

Catch Bryan’s presentation with a full transcript here.

The 2nd day was a blast as well, where many speakers hurriedly rushed to creatively modify their presentations to include some not so subtle ribbing on Pivotal Labs. For some reason I can vaguely remember now, Pivotal (and their “way”) came of as a hard sell for the audience and the speakers.

The most ingenious was Greg Pollack‘s where he somehow managed to integrate a back masked message in his deck. Pivotal is Evil flashed for a split second between the back masked slides.

All tongue in cheek though.

Taking a break between talks. They had Red Bull flowing for that afternoon boost. Thanks @bridgeutopia for this snap.

The most memorable one in my book though was Tom Werner-Preston‘s presentation on git‘s innards, most particularly the intro about Github. It had a lot of slides of beer, beer on tap, and beer drinking.

That evening, they bought the beer at Uluru. Jason and I went home at 3am I think.

Tom Preston-Werner on advanced GIT techniques. Thanks for the ale Tom...

Since Github bought beers, I made sure to get some major action going on my Untappd check ins that night.

Thanks to Ed of Engineyard who bought a round of beers as well. His T-shirt says No ticket? It didn’t happen. Take heed.

Here’s a Google Doc that aggregates all the relevant RubyDotRedConf 2011 resources

Needless to say, we all had a blast and can’t wait to come back next year.  Hope to see these guys again on May 19 at the monthly PhRUG meetup.

Until then, Semper Fi, do or die.

Elements.js is a new browser based development framework coming out of Days of Thunder that uses pure HTML5, CSS3, and Javascript to help you build Rich Internet Applications and games.

Lead developers on the project Jason Torres and Jopi Ardona worked hard to finish first iteration in time for Game Jam and were still coding just before we left for the event.

Jason Torres (@jasontorres) and Jopi Ardona busy hacking away at the elements.js code base just before we left for Game Jam.

The next milestone release for Elements.js should be around March and will be presented again at Roofcamp. Till then, you can play around with the current release as it progresses. Just visit the project website at www.elementsjs.com.

Gam Jam participants chow down before forming the respective teams.

Carl was introduced to us by Terence Pua, founder/CEO of insync and curator for the Manila edition of The Startup Digest.

Carl Coryell-Martin sharing the Pivotal development methodology, cerveza in hand.

A few months ago, I posted a video of Carl’s talk at Echelon 2010 on Real World Agile Development. I’ve been following Pivotal Labs for a while and am intrigued by how they’ve evolved their work methodology throughout their organization. Highlighted by pair programming, work-life-balance, and of course Test Driven Development, Agile the Pivotal Way has been borrowed and adopted by many Rails Development firms.

They’ve even publicly shared Pivotal Tracker, their SCRUM project management tool which (through a quick survey) was being used by roughly 80% of the RoR developers in attendance that night.

PHRUG listening to the talk with rapt attention

It’s no surprise then that Carl’s talk was eagerly anticipated and well received by the philippine Ruby community, which also welcomed Carl’s colleagues including Mike Mazur. (I forgot your business card at the office @amir, and no-joy on googling you so i’ll have to edit this post later

]]> http://blog.proudcloud.net/2010/12/phrug-and-pivotal-labs-at-proudcloud-hq/feed/ 0 http://blog.proudcloud.net/2010/11/proudcloud-activates-days-of-thunder/ http://blog.proudcloud.net/2010/11/proudcloud-activates-days-of-thunder/#comments Thu, 25 Nov 2010 05:37:46 +0000 Jay Fajardo http://blog.proudcloud.net/?p=568 We’re here at Proudcloud to build things, and much of our driving force comes from the ideas we brew and transforming them into awesome apps.

To make sure we don’t lose touch with the innovative spirit we feed on, we’ve designated Thursdays and Fridays as Days of Thunder, when everyone is encouraged to build out our internal projects, develop new stuff, and go into full hacking mode.

DoT was designed to put structure into our R&D efforts so that ideas we have aren’t eternally kept in the icebox waiting for “when we’ve got free time”.

For good measure, Saturdays & Sundays are there for when the hacking velocity becomes too strong to quit.

During DoT though, we never ignore client work as all our project engineers are ready to heed our clients’ urgent call.

While Proudcloud codes with Rails 3.0.0, Ruby 1.9.2RC and the latest builds of MongoDB/Mongoid, being on the edge does have its drawbacks when using hosting providers who need to play it safe with stable package releases.

When deploying Rails 3 Mongoid based apps on EY’s AppCloud, we discovered that;

• EY does not support MongoDB out of the box and requires custom chef recipes;
• You need to create a custom cluster of instances with MongoDB installed on a utility instance;
• EY’s latest installed binary of  MongoDB version is 1.4.4 while Mongoid 2.beta.17 requires >= 1.6.0.
• There’s no documentation anywhere to help you with this issue.

Getting MongoDB on Engine Yard

As a backgrounder, Engine Yard has custom recipes that will allow you to install MongoDB (and other packages) on AppCloud. The recipes can be found on github, with specific instructions for MongoDB here.

Remember though to un-comment the reference to MongoDB in cookbooks/main/recipes/default.rb.

The ridiculously simple solution: Portage

Trying to make various Mongoid versions and dependencies play well with 1.4.4 and Rails 3.0.0 failed miserably. EY support suggested we tweak the emerge recipes to retrieve the desired build and have the package installed during the EY deploy.

Jason Torres, who has a black belt in rails app deployment, thought otherwise and discovered a simpler approach.

Going into your utility instance’s shell, you’ll find the various Gentoo Portage package definitions for MongoDB in /engineyard/portage/engineyard/dev-db/mongodb-bin/. We wanted the latest MongoDB build which was 1.6.2 at the time of this writing.

The trick is to have Portage retrieve the latest MongoDB build. To do this, Jason merely copied the .ebuild definition for the latest build to another file, making sure that the target filename included the desired build version number.

When you run the emerge command, Portage determines the build version from the filename. Given this, the next step would be to simply execute emerge on the .ebuild file with the –digest parameter. This would add it to the Portage tree.

The last step would be to restart MongoDB.

note If you had not yet installed any MongoDB version on your instance, you can start instead with the Portage steps (sans MongoDB restart) and then proceed to the instructions for custom recipes.

So go ahead and get rockin’ with the latest Mongodb+Mongoid on Engine Yard.

Gavin and I drove round and round trying to find the place but finally found it after failed attempts at geolocating ourselves using the iPhone. Parking was a mess although we got a spot close enough to walk to the Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf without breaking a sweat.

We were late looking for the place but eventually arrived to catch the last slide of  Piotr Banasik‘s preso. I hope he shares it with us on Slideshare.

Adam Baechler welcomed us at the registration desk with free CB&T Swirl cards with load!

We got to meet a few interesting folks from the developer community who we quickly invited to Roofcamp. The collection of geeks included meetup organizers  Mike Stephenson and Mark Leduc of OutsourcingThingsDone, Ming Andrada & Vic Zapata of Webbuggers, Elmer Rivera of EXIST, and a few other guys we failed to get business cards from.

Gavin noticed a bar beside CB&T called Izumi Sake earlier so after we wrapped up our coffee laced meet-and-greet, we moved next door for some real networking over beers and chilled Sake.

After an hour or two of kampais and saluds, Gavin and I realized that we hadn’t had dinner yet. On the way home, Gavin suggested a quick run for some Mickey D’s but I told him that I’d bring him to Stackers for some real burgers. The Jack Burgers, fries, and a Coke really hit the spot!

The OTD boys invited us to a party tonight at Kuya’s but since I got home around 2:30am this morning, I’m pretty sure I’ve worn out my wife’s patience for the weekend (I even missed the Argentina-Brazil game).

Thanks fellas for a rocking meetup and the awesome convo over sake!