On October 1st of this year, Facebook will be requiring that all apps on Facebook must support HTTPS (SSL).

I’ve provided a guide below which I’ve used for apps I’ve worked on that are Rails based.

This guide shows you how to change your Rails Facebook App into an app that supports SSL using Passenger and Apache2.

Step 1: Get an SSL cert or roll your own.

Dreamhost.com made it very easy to add an SSL cert for just $15.00 / year.

I tried out my app out using a locally signed certificate which seemed to work just fine:

Step 2: Install and compile Apache 2

Get the latest version of Apache: http://httpd.apache.org/download.cgi.

Configure and compile Apache:
./configure –prefix=/usr/local/apache2 –enable-rewrite –enable-so –enable-ssl
make && make install

Step 3: Configure your Rails app

gem install passenger
passenger-install-apache2-module

Step 4: Edit your Apache 2 config files:

Edit httpd.conf. For example:

LoadModule fcgid_module modules/mod_fcgid.so
LoadModule passenger_module /Users/jimbarcelona/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.2-p290/gems/passenger-3.0.8/ext/apache2/mod_passenger.so
PassengerRoot /Users/jimbarcelona/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.2-p290/gems/passenger-3.0.8
PassengerRuby /Users/jimbarcelona/.rvm/wrappers/ruby-1.9.2-p290/ruby


    Options Indexes FollowSymLinks
    AllowOverride All
    Order allow,deny
    Allow from all


Include conf/extra/httpd-vhosts.conf
Include conf/extra/httpd-ssl.conf


IPCCommTimeout 40
IPCConnectTimeout 10

# TODO: change this to production if you are on production
DefaultInitEnv RAILS_ENV development
SocketPath /tmp/fcgidsock

Edit extra/httpd-vhosts.conf:

  ServerName berkeley.l33tcave.com
  ServerAdmin wwwadmin@berkeley.l33tcave.com
  DocumentRoot /Users/jimbarcelona/rails_apps/github/hipsterhookups.com/public
  ErrorLog /usr/local/apache2/logs/rails_error_log
  RewriteEngine On
  
    AllowOverride All
    Options -MultiViews
  
  RailsEnv development

Edit extra/httpd-ssl.conf:

#   General setup for the virtual host
DocumentRoot "/Users/jimbarcelona/rails_apps/github/hipsterhookups.com/public"
ServerName berkeley.l33tcave.com:443
ServerAdmin you@example.com
ErrorLog "/usr/local/apache2/logs/error_log"
TransferLog "/usr/local/apache2/logs/access_log"

# needed for rails
Options Indexes ExecCGI FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine On
RailsEnv development

AddHandler fcgid-script .fcgi

  
    AllowOverride All
    Options -MultiViews
  

Be sure to add your SSL certs in the httpd-ssl.conf too!

Step 5: Start Apache

# check syntax
apachectl configtest
# start apache
apachectl start

Step 6: Go to facebook and use https for canvas URLs

Here’s how I upgraded Sitebeagle.net to Rails 3.

1. Go into your site’s Rails directory and install rails_upgrade:

script/plugin install git://github.com/rails/rails_upgrade.git

Run the following commands and follow the instructions:

rake rails:upgrade:check
rake rails:upgrade:backup
rake rails:upgrade:routes
rake rails:upgrade:gems
rake rails:upgrade:configuration

2. Make sure that your version of Ruby 1.9+ has iconv working.

Mine didn’t, so I went through this process:

rvm package install readline
rvm package install iconv
rvm remove 1.9.2
rvm install –trace 1.9.2 -C –with-iconv-dir=$HOME/.rvm/usr

to test:
irb
require ‘iconv’ # should return true

3. Upgrade to Rails 3: gem install rails

4. Start migrating to Rails 3: I branched my site using git and went into my Rails root directory and typed:

rails `pwd`

Use your best judgment on what can and cannot be over-written. Here’s my list:

* let rails overwrite?
* overwrite rake file
* overwrite application_controller.rb? yes but copy
* application_helper.rb ? yes
* routes.rb ? yes but copy
* environment.rb ?
* make new initializer for contants
* config.gem? copy and put into a Gemfile
* application.js ? only if confident in js
* scripts? overwrite all

5. See if stuff works:

rails server

Twitter-auth broke for me, so I had to update it to work on Rails 3 using this guide:

https://github.com/benders/twitter-auth/compare/master…rails_3

How’s your upgrade to Rails 3 go? Let me know in the comments below.

Update (14 January 2011):

Chris Laco wrote up this great guide to upgrading Rails 3 on Dreamhost. It solves path problem issues with gems.

There’s a great lightbox plugin for Ruby on Rails called Redbox. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work out of the box, but here’s the patch for redbox.js:

Replace:

With:

Remove or comment out:

Remove:

I really like how the Rails console solves the problems of test object creation and debugging.

Usually, a web developer will push code to the webserver and hit shift-reload on the web browser. With the Rails console, you can avoid all that shift-reload madness.

If I wanted to create 10000 blog posts for testing, I could do something like this:

script/console
10000.times
{ |i| Post.create(:title => “post number: ” + i.to_s, :body => “autogen Booyah!”) }

Through the console I can also do debugging pretty easily:

>> p = Post.find 888

And get this as output:

=> #

A lot of problems in Rails are just solved by running script/console and checking the values of certain variables that are pretty hard to get at through a web browser.

There is pretty much no limit to what can be done through the Rails console. Konstantin Gredeskoul, web developer and songwriter, has found a way to load session data through the console.

Blogging software should meet four important criteria:
1) Easy import from a pre-existing piece of blogging software we’re not happy with.
2) Spam filtering protection in comments
3) Make it easy to add web analytics javascript tracking without deleting it during each upgrade.
4) Should make it easy to not look like Mephisto blogging software or WordPress or like generic blogging software.

Mephisto meets all four criteria.

Plus it leverages the advantages of Rails in that out of the box you can deploy to development, test and production environments. Also it integrates with no mess into shopify or any other Rails project that you might be working.

Hats off to Rick Olson(Development) and Justin Palmer(UI/Design) for making Mephisto along with “a bunch of other cool people.”