Using mod_rewrite to return default images

August 26th, 2009 § 3

The Problem

We have a web app running that displays pages of thumbnails.  Instead of having a rails action that would return the thumbnail or a default image if no thumbnail was available, I used Apache’s mod_rewrite to do it for me.

The behavior I was looking for was if the image requested existed then pass the request through.  If the image requested did not exist on the file system then rewrite the request to /images/image_not_available.jpg

The Rewrite Rules

The rewrite rules I needed were simple and may not work for anyone elses need but all of our thumbnails are stored as /thumbnails/image_filename.jpg

Using RewriteCond -f then I can check if the requested file name exists on the file system.

RewriteCond %{DOCUMENT_ROOT}%{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteRule ^(/thumbnails/.+)\.jpg$  /images/image_not_available.jpg [L]

Saved  me the overhead of having a Rails action that does the same thing.

Less Rails More Migrate

February 10th, 2009 § 4

I’ve recently needed a way to migrate multiple databases, all with different connections and migrations, with a single rake task. Our first solution was to just create a new rails project for each database, setup our database.yml file as normal and drop the migrations into db/migrate.

We could have called it there and been done with it. But I’m lazy. Having to go into each directory and run rake db:migrate was not going to let me reach the level of lazy I strive for. Not to mention all of the bloat of having a full rails projects hanging around just for the migrations.

Let’s make it lazy friendly ™.

The Setup

I first created the directory structure that would hold each databases config file and migrations.

migrator
 -> db
   -> configs
   -> migrations
 -> logs

For each database that needed to be migrated I created the following files:

migrator/configs/sample_database_1.yml

adapter: mysql
database: sample_database_name
username: supersecret
password: plaintext
host: localhost

Just the standard database.yml file without the development, production, etc top level nodes since this would only be run in one environment.

Folder in migrator/migrations named after the config yml

Using the example above then the folder would be /migrator/migrations/sample_database_1. In that folder we could drop all of our migration files (001_first_migration.rb, 002_second_migration, etc).

The meat of our lazy sandwich

A rake file to run all these migrations.

migrator/Rakefile

require 'active_record'
require 'yaml'
 
task :default => :migrate
desc "Migrate the database(s) in db/migrations."
task :migrate do
   migration_dir = Dir.new(File.join(File.dirname(__FILE__),"db","migrations"))
   config_dir    = Dir.new(File.join(File.dirname(__FILE__),"db","configs")).path
   logs_dir      = Dir.new(File.join(File.dirname(__FILE__), "logs")).path
 migration_dir.each do |d|
   next if d.first == '.'
     puts "Migrating '#{d}'..."
     begin
       ActiveRecord::Base.establish_connection(YAML::load(File.open(File.join(config_dir, "#{d}.yml"))))
       ActiveRecord::Base.logger = Logger.new(File.open(File.join(logs_dir, "#{d}.log"), 'a'))
       ActiveRecord::Migrator.migrate(File.join(migration_dir.path, d), ENV["VERSION"] ? ENV["VERSION"].to_i : nil)
       puts "Done"
     rescue Exception => e
       puts "\n\n#{e.to_s}\n"
     end
   end
end

Run It

Now to run our new migrator just go into the migrator directory and run

> rake

You can also pass it a version if you want to run migrate to a certain version. Just keep in mind it will migrate all of the databases to the same version. Great for the solution I needed maybe not great for yours.

For all the lazies out there (unite!) I’ve put together a tar that has the rake file and directory structure already setup. Grab it from here.