Hulihan Applications Blog

Sublime Text 2 Desktop Entry File

Tue, 12 Jun 2012 13:28:00 -0400

Are you using Ubuntu and Sublime Text 2 and need a handy launcher icon? Here's a .desktop file That you can paste into ~/.local/share/applications/sublime_text.desktop or /usr/share/applications/sublime_text.desktop:

A couple things to note:

Remember to make this file executable.
This file runs the sublime_text binary. This assumes you already have the path to its parent directory in $PATH or symlinked to /usr/bin or something.
If you don't have the Sublime Text icon on your machine, grab it here and save it as ~/.local/share/icons/sublime_text.png.

Once you've set this up, you can lock it to your launcher. Here's a screenshot:

Nginx Unity Quicklist

Thu, 09 Feb 2012 14:35:00 -0500

Ubuntu's Unity Interface has many handy features, one of which is a new launcher bar that supports Quicklists. Each launcher icon can have a customizable list of options that let you run the program however you want. Here's a quicklist for the popular webserver nginx.

First, Install nginx-init-ubuntu.

Add create a new file .local/share/applications/ named nginx.desktop and paste this inside:

[Desktop Entry]
Name=Nginx
Comment=Nginx Webserver
Exec=sudo service nginx start
Icon=/usr/share/icons/nginx.png
Type=Application
Categories=Web;Servers;
StartupNotify=true
Terminal=true
#OnlyShowIn=GNOME;Unity;
X-Ubuntu-Gettext-Domain=nginx
X-Ayatana-Desktop-Shortcuts=Start;Stop;Restart;

[Start Shortcut Group]
Name=Start Nginx
Exec=sudo service nginx start
TargetEnvironment=Unity

[Stop Shortcut Group]
Name=Stop Nginx
Exec=sudo service nginx stop
TargetEnvironment=Unity

[Restart Shortcut Group]
Name=Restart Nginx
Exec=sudo service nginx restart
TargetEnvironment=Unity

Using your file manager (such as nautilus), drag .local/share/applications/nginx.desktop to the launcher.

nginx init script for ubuntu/debian

Thu, 26 Jan 2012 07:37:00 -0500

For those of you using nginx and debian-based distributions such as Ubuntu, Mepis, Mint, etc. you may have noticed that the init script on nginx's wiki doesn't work very well with newer distributions such as Ubuntu 10.04/11.10, etc. Instead, let's use upstart, which is much cleaner.

First, add this to /etc/init/nginx.conf:

description "Nginx HTTP Server"

start on filesystem
stop on runlevel [!2345]

respawn
exec /opt/nginx/sbin/nginx -g "daemon off;"

Note: By default, this script thinks nginx is in /opt/nginx. If your nginx configuration is different, change it to specify the correct location.

...now start 'er up:


$ sudo start nginx
nginx start/running, process 11922

That's all there is to it. You can fork this script over at github if you want to make any changes or suggestions. This repo also includes an old System V style script if you need it.

Kudos

This script is based off of Big Rock's upstart script from their RVM + Rails 3 + nginx + Phusion Passenger guide.

* Updated 2012-04-10: Added upstart instructions

Aptana desktop entry file

Mon, 23 Jan 2012 00:25:00 -0500

For those of you Linux users using Gnome, KDE, or Unity, here's a desktop entry file that you can use to create a shortcut/launcher icon to Aptana Studio 3. Just add this to /usr/share/applications or ~/.local/share/applications.

[Desktop Entry]
Encoding=UTF-8
Version=1.0
Name=Aptana Studio 3
Comment=The professional, open source development tool for the open web
Icon=/opt/aptana-studio-3/icon.xpm
GenericName=Aptana Studio
Type=Application
Exec=/opt/aptana-studio-3/AptanaStudio3
MimeType=text/plain;
Categories=Development;IDE;

This assumes you've installed Aptana to /opt/aptana-studio-3, so if yours is in a different directory, be sure to change it.

Kudos

Credit goes to Willington Vega for supplying the original desktop entry file.

Introducing fletcher

Tue, 20 Dec 2011 08:49:00 -0500

We recently created a new ruby gem called fletcher. It's a cross- website product/item information fetcher. To use fletcher, all you have to do it pass it a url to a product on one of favorite websites. You'll get back an easy-to-use ActiveRecord-like object(a Hashie::Mash) that contains useful information about that product, including its name, description, images, etc. Let's see it in action.

item = Fletcher.fetch

item.name # => "Avenir Deluxe Unicycle (20-Inch Wheel)"

item.description # => "A wonderful unicycle"

item.image # => {:url => "http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41b3TNb3uCL._SL500_AA300_.jpg", :alt => "Picture of 
Unicycle"}

item.image.url # => "http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41b3TNb3uCL._SL500_AA300_.jpg"

We originally wrote fletcher for use in our wishlist-sharing website, WishlistFactory, so you would only need to enter the url of a gift you want, and the gift information would automatically be fetched and included on your wishlist. We thought other people might find this useful, so we packaged it up as a gem and released it to the public.

The source code of fletcher is also on github, so if you'd like to add a supported website to fletcher, or make any other changes, feel free to fork it!

Autodetecting OAuth Providers with OmniAuth

Thu, 15 Sep 2011 17:10:00 -0400

OmniAuth is a great gem for OAuth authentication in any rack application such as Ruby on Rails, Sinatra, etc. If you're using it in Rails, I wrote a handy little initializer that will automatically load in your OAuth provider credentials from a yaml config file instead of defining them directly in the initialzer.

# config/providers.yml
providers:
  google:
    key: CONSUMER_KEY
    secret: CONSUMER_SECRET 
  facebook:
    key: APP_ID
    secret: APP_SECRET
  twitter:
    key: CONSUMER_KEY
    secret: CONSUMER_SECRET

# config/initializers/omniauth.rb
if Rails.env != 'test'  
  config = YAML::load(File.open(Rails.root.join, "config", "providers.yml")))
  if config && !config.empty?
    Rails.application.config.middleware.use OmniAuth::Builder do        
      config["providers"].each do |name, credentials|
        provider name.to_sym, credentials["key"], credentials["secret"], {:client_options => config[:client_options]}       
      end
    end
  end
end

This makes it easy to add/delete providers by editing the providers.yml config file.

Introduction to Humanizer

Sun, 11 Sep 2011 14:21:00 -0400

Humanizer is a great little Rails 3 gem that provides basic text-based captcha validation to your models & forms. This verifies whether the form submitter is human or not.

While many other captchas are image based, they're not usually suitable for applications that can be used with several locales/languages. You wouldn't show a Russian user an image with English text, right?

Humanizer solves this problem by using I18n-based question and answer files. It also comes with several prewritten question files in several languages, and it's easy to edit these later if you want to add custom questions.

Installation

gem install humanizer
rails g humanizer

Usage

Add this to your model:

class User < ActiveRecord::Base
  include Humanizer
  require_human_on :create
end

Then add this to your form:

<%= f.label :humanizer_answer, f.object.humanizer_question %>
<%= f.text_field :humanizer_answer %>
<%= f.hidden_field :humanizer_question_id %>

Controller Support

Right now, Humanizer is used only with ActiveRecord models and FormBuilder(ie: form_for). If you want to add Humanizer support to Rails forms that don't use these(such as form_tag), you can add controller support with an initializer. Copy this to config/initializers/humanizer.rb:

module Humanizer
  module ActionController
    def self.included(base)
      base.send(:include, ::Humanizer) # add Humanizer support to Controller class
      base.send(:include, InstanceMethods)  
    end
    
    module InstanceMethods
      def check_humanizer_answer
        unless human?
          flash[:failure] = I18n.translate("humanizer.validation.error")
          redirect_to :back
        end
      end
      
      def human?
        if params[:humanizer_answer] && params[:humanizer_question_id]
          self.humanizer_answer = params[:humanizer_answer]
          self.humanizer_question_id = params[:humanizer_question_id]
          return humanizer_correct_answer?                        
        else
          return false
        end 
      end
    end
  end
end

ActionController::Base.send :include, Humanizer::ActionController # add humanizer support to controller

Then add this to your form:

<%= label_tag :humanizer_answer, controller.humanizer_question %>
<%= text_field_tag :humanizer_answer %>
<%= hidden_field_tag :humanizer_question_id, controller.humanizer_question_id %>

And this to your controller:

# app/controllers/your_controller.rb
class YourController < ApplicationController
  before_filter :check_humanizer_answer, :only => [:send_email]

That's it!

Mass rename .rhtml files to .html.erb

Sat, 27 Aug 2011 03:06:00 -0400

Are you upgrading an old Rails 2.x application to Rails 3? If so, you'll probably want to change any files ending in .rhtml to .html.erb. Here's a handy command that will recursively rename every .rhtml file in your entire application:

find ./ -name \*.rhtml -type f | sed 's/\(.*\).rhtml$/mv "&" "\1.html.erb"/' | sh

Teamwork: whenever and bundler

Wed, 24 Aug 2011 19:27:00 -0400

Here's a quick whenever schedule.rb file for of you who are using bundler to run rake commands(via bundle exec).

job_type :bundle_exec, 'cd :path && bundle exec :task :output' # :path is set to project dir by default

every 1.hours do
  # bundle_exec "rake [task]"
  bundle_exec "rake log:clear"
end

RSpec & Rails: Simulating File Uploads

Mon, 22 Aug 2011 14:41:00 -0400

Do you need to simulate file uploads while testing in Rails & RSpec? Well, It's easy to do. Let's pretend you're using rails 3.0.9 and you want to test uploading a picture, which will be stored as an record of an Image model. Let's also assume that you can pass an uploaded file directly to your model. Here's what your model might look like:

class Image < ActiveRecord::Base
  attr_accessor :file
  before_create :save file

  def save_file
    File.open(Rails.root.join('public', 'images', file.original_filename), 'w') do |file|
       file.write(file.read)
     end
  end
end

To simulate a file upload in your test, save a real file in a directory somewhere(we'll use spec/fixtures/images), and then create a new Image record and pass it a ActionDispatch::Http::UploadedFile object (which rails uses to handle uploaded files).

file = File.new(Rails.root + 'spec/fixtures/images/rails.png')
@image = Image.new(:file => ActionDispatch::Http::UploadedFile.new(:tempfile => file, :filename => File.basename(file))
file.close
@image.save

That's it! Now your Image record has a valid file, just like the real thing. If you're using factory_girl for testing, you can automatically create a record with a file already "uploaded" to it:

Factory.define :image do |o|
  file = File.new(Rails.root + 'spec/fixtures/images/rails.png')
  file.rewind
  o.file ActionDispatch::Http::UploadedFile.new(:tempfile => file, :filename => File.basename(file))
end

@image = Factory(:image)