The Codebelay Blog » WebApps

Upgrade Your Rails Facebook App to SSL

barce — Wed, 14 Sep 2011 05:39:27 +0000

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:

openssl genrsa -des3 -out server.key 2048
openssl req -new -key server.key -out server.csr
cp server.key server.key.org
openssl rsa -in server.key.org -out server.key
openssl x509 -req -days 365 -in server.csr -signkey server.key -out server.crt

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

Setting Up Cucumber and RSpec on Padrino

barce — Wed, 27 Jul 2011 04:14:01 +0000

This is a quick guide on how to set up Cucumber and RSpec on Padrino.

I’ve created a simple test app on github that reflects the steps written down here.

1. Create the app:

padrino g project todo -t cucumber -d sequel -b

2. In the Gemfile use rake 0.8.7:

gem 'rake', "0.8.7"

3. In features/support/env.rb comment out “require ‘spec/expectations’” so it looks like:

# require 'spec/expectations'

At this point ‘cucumber features’ should work and should return a failed test for adding two numbers.

Also at this point, if you create any models, then bare specs for them will be created in the ‘spec/models’ folder.

Please feel free to leave questions or comments if you’ve got a different way of setting things up on Padrino.

How To Test Image Uploads With MiniTest On Padrino

barce — Fri, 22 Jul 2011 17:11:04 +0000

This week I got to pair program with Oren Golan whose last high profile job was at Border Stylo. While there, he wrote a series of excellent blog posts that I highly recommend reading. The one that caught my eye was his post on MiniTest, that’s a lighter version of RSpec.

We created a Padrino app that uses the Sequel gem as an ORM for SQLite.

We tested a raw file upload and the uploading capabilities of Carrierwave.

The working test is on http://github.com/barce/test, and to run it just clone the repo and type the following:

cd test
bundle install
padrino sq:migrate:up

Here’s the test:

# put this into the test/test.rb file
require 'rubygems'
gem 'minitest'
require 'minitest/autorun'
require 'rack/test'
require '../config/boot.rb'

class TestManualBadgeType < MiniTest::Unit::TestCase
  include Rack::Test::Methods

  FILE2UPLOAD  = "/Users/jimbarcelona/pink-pony.jpg"
  UPLOADEDFILE = "/Users/jimbarcelona/repos/oren/forks/test/test/pink-pony.jpg"

  def app() Test end

  def setup
    if File.exist?(UPLOADEDFILE)
      File.delete(UPLOADEDFILE)
    end
  end

  def test_opload
    post '/', 'file' => Rack::Test::UploadedFile.new(FILE2UPLOAD, 'image/jpeg')

    assert_equal last_response.status, 201
  end

  def test_carrierwave_201
    post '/carrierwave', 'file' => Rack::Test::UploadedFile.new(FILE2UPLOAD, 'image/jpeg')

    assert_equal last_response.status, 201
  end

  def test_carrierwave_file_exist
    post '/carrierwave', 'file' => Rack::Test::UploadedFile.new(FILE2UPLOAD, 'image/jpeg')
    assert_equal last_response.status, 201
  end
end

Now you’re ready to run the test upload:

cd test
ruby test.rb

Why is Foursquare Down? 3 Educated Guesses

barce — Tue, 05 Oct 2010 01:38:51 +0000

Why is Foursquare down?

Update (5 October 2010 at 5:36 pm PDT) : The folks at Foursquare tell us why in a post-mortem. There are autosharding issues with MongoDB. Yup, my guesses were wrong, unless you consider MongoDB a kind of cache.

I used to work for a few sites that required high scalability expertise. Now that we’re over 5 hours into the outage I’ll share some of my thoughts.

But before I do, I’d just like to say, I really hope that it’s nothing bad and I really like the Foursquare peeps. I’m not putting out this article to harsh on anybody, but just to share some knowledge I have. Outages happen to everybody!

Also, I do not feel that this meltdown is in any way indicative of Amazon’s EC2. I have a site that shares the same IP space and facility as Foursquare and we have had no outages today.

The worst case scenario is a full scale Magnolia meltdown. This is where because of a backup process that was off, they cannot restore ever from backup. Odds: unlikely.
Someone turned off caching. I’m not sure how cache dependent the architecture is at Foursquare. If someone turned off the cache and the cache is just plain gone, then the caches have to be re-built. Rebuilding caches, depending on the time and complexity of each query can take up to 100x more time that it takes to retrieve the cache. If there’s some cached item that takes 100 seconds per user, the site will be down for a long time. They can only put a user back on foursquare at a rate of 100 per second if that’s the case, unless they can concurrently run the re-building of the cache.
There’s an issue with a hacker who has broken through security and is wreaking havoc on Foursquare. It’s happened to the best sites, e.g. Google in the 90s, and it’s pretty tough to recover from. Sometimes you let the criminals in and do their worst while keeping the site up. Sometimes you have 0 tolerance.

I wish Foursquare the best of luck. I am more than happy to lend a hand to their issues, if they need another pair of eyes.

Dineovore Gives Techies an API

barce — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 01:44:37 +0000

Check out Dinevore if you’re a foodie who is a techie. Their API is now live!

Contact them via twitter or contact their team via email.

Twitter: Thoughts That Are Hard to Fit Into 140 Characters

barce — Tue, 01 Jun 2010 09:20:36 +0000

What are the limits of expressing thoughts in Twitter?

Here’s a powerful but inefficient (when run) thought that can be expressed on Twitter, a quick sort in Erlang in 126 characters.

qsort([]) -> [];
qsort([Pivot|T]) ->
qsort([X || X <- T, X < Pivot])
++ [Pivot] ++
qsort([X || X <- T, X >= Pivot]).

A lot of Perl one-liners can fit into a tweet – powerful and useful ones.

Haikus can be expressed in a tweet.

The answer to the question, “What form of body language do most FBI interrogators consider to be the most telling?” can be answered in a tweet.

A marriage proposal can be answered in a tweet.

You can propose the concept of a hash tag in a tweet:

However, there are many thoughts that seem to be difficult to fit into a tweet:

The Pythagorean Theorem and one of its many proofs
Anselm’s Ontological Proof for God’s Existence
Merge Sort in Ruby
Merge Sort in PHP
Why you should or shouldn’t outsource
What qualities make a great tech hire
Well-thought out political proofs
How to subtly tell someone something in an indirect way with the only others knowing being those in the know
A legally-binding, work contract – It would be amazing if you could!
The mechanism for how DNA works

Twitter encourages the laconic expression of thought which means plenty of affirmations, aphorisms, insults, congratulations, and reminders that can display any combination of sharp wit, pointed humor, and succinctness of expression. The mot juste becomes very important with the constraint of 140 characters.

URL Shorteners: tinyurl.com bit.ly and seductive.me

barce — Mon, 17 May 2010 08:11:25 +0000

There’s a pretty useful spreadsheet comparing different URL shorteners here:
http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=pApF4slh39ZkqUOoZQSo8bg .

Tinyurl just really shortens your URL and doesn’t provide any other data. A great feature is the preview option that allows you to preview a link so you don’t get Rick-rolled.

Bit.ly is my favorite service. The features I like are

its API,
its analytics, and
its Pro feature which allows you to make a branded URL shortener

I wanted to figure out just how much effort it was to code a URL so I coded up my own MVC based on Rasmus’ article on making one in PHP, and added URL shortening code to it. You can get the URL shortener I wrote on Github.

Here are a few things that I noticed once I put this code on Seductive.me:

Somebody found a bad, infinite loop that I accidentally put into the code
URL Shortener services that offer analytics have to sort out “bots” from real user clicks, and I’m not sure they are correct 100% of the time
Using CRC32 as my hashing mechanism for shortening URLs will cause a link collision after 65,536 URLs shortened.
Seductive.me is a lame url for a URL shortener which is why I got 3vi.be the next day.

Notes on adding more MySQL databases

barce — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 23:56:04 +0000

Just notes for myself on adding more MySQL databases without shutting down the master database.

on existing slave:

/etc/init.d/mysqld stop

copy data dir from /var/lib/mysql and data from /var/run/mysqld to new slave database:

cd /var/lib
tar cvf Mysql_slave.tar mysql/*
scp Mysql_slave.tar root@new-db.com:/var/lib/.
cd /var/run
tar cvf Mysqld_slave.tar mysqld/*
scp Mysqld_slave.tar mysqld/*
scp Mysqld_slave.tar root@new-db.com:/var/run/.

copy /etc/my.cnf from old slave to new slave
add entry for new server-id

start existing slave:

cd /var/lib
tar xvf Mysql_slave.tar
cd /var/run
tar xvf Mysqld_slave.tar
/etc/init.d/mysqld start

start new slave:

/etc/init.d/mysqld start
mysql
start slave;

on masterdb:
e.g.:

grant replication slave on *.* to ‘repl’@’192.168.107.33′ identified by ‘password’;

test on master:
create database repl;

check on slave:
show databases; /* should show new database */

test on master:
drop database repl;

check on slave:
show databases; /* new database should be dropped */

Now it’s time to turn this into an automated shell script with Expect in there.

Social Media Backup – What are the options now?

barce — Sun, 04 Oct 2009 17:13:57 +0000

Bad things happen:

Dear Twitter,

My Twitter page @mostlylisa has been hacked and deleted. It’s GONE!!! I am currently catatonic. Please help me restore my account, it’s like, my meaning in life.

Much love to whom ever helps me!

PS. If you miss me like I miss you, you can always be my Friend OR Fan on Facebook. I know it’s not the same, but it’s all I have now. *hold me*

It only took twitter about 3 days to recover from this.

Is there a faster way?

First let’s look at the current options:

TweetBackup (NY Times)
BackUpMyTweets
If you are popular enough and folks raise a raucous, Twitter will go into the database back-up and restore your account into its pristine set up.

BackupMyTweets required too much info to get it working. No, you cannot have my gmail password.

I’ve tried Tweetbackup and they get kudos for using OAuth to make it easy to back your tweets up.

The 3rd option, begging Twitter, simply can’t scale and will only work for those few elites close to Twitter or popular enough. There isn’t a consumer solution.

How do we solve the problem of social media backup?

The great thing is the problem is:

technical
can have the same business model as insurance
will gain recognition as more snafus happen

Once again, if you haven’t already, use BackUpMyTweets.

Benchmarking Inserts on Drizzle and MySQL

barce — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 17:00:40 +0000

I’m not comparing apples to apples yet… but out of the box, drizzle does inserts faster than MySQL using the same table type, InnoDB.

Here’s what I’m comparing:
drizzle r1126 configured with defaults, and
MySQL 5.1.38 configured with

./configure --prefix=/usr/local/mysql --with-extra-charsets=complex \
--enable-thread-safe-client --enable-local-infile --enable-shared \
--with-plugins=partition,innobase

which is really nothing complicated.

SQL query caching is turned off on both database servers. Both are using the InnoDB engine plug-in.

I’m running these benchmarks on a MacBook Pro 2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo with 2GB 1067 MHz DDR3 RAM.

I wrote benchmarking software about 2 years ago to test partitions but I’ve since abstracted the code to be database agnostic.

You can get the benchmarking code at Github.

At the command-line, you type:

php build_tables.php 10000 4 drizzle

where 10000 is the number of rows allocated total, and 4 is the number of partitions for those rows.

You can type the same thing for mysql:

php build_tables.php 10000 4 mysql

and get interesting results.

Here’s what I got:

MySQL

bash-3.2$ php build_tables.php 10000 4 mysql
Elapsed time between Start and Test_Code_Partition: 13.856538
last table for php partition: users_03
Elapsed time between No_Partition and Code_Partition: 14.740206
-------------------------------------------------------------
marker           time index            ex time         perct
-------------------------------------------------------------
Start            1252376759.26094100   -                0.00%
-------------------------------------------------------------
No_Partition     1252376773.11747900   13.856538       48.45%
-------------------------------------------------------------
Code_Partition   1252376787.85768500   14.740206       51.54%
-------------------------------------------------------------
Stop             1252376787.85815000   0.000465         0.00%
-------------------------------------------------------------
total            -                     28.597209      100.00%
-------------------------------------------------------------
20000 rows inserted...

drizzle

bash-3.2$ php build_tables.php 10000 4 drizzle
Elapsed time between Start and Test_Code_Partition: 7.502141
last table for php partition: users_03
Elapsed time between No_Partition and Code_Partition: 7.072367
-------------------------------------------------------------
marker           time index            ex time         perct
-------------------------------------------------------------
Start            1252376733.68141500   -                0.00%
-------------------------------------------------------------
No_Partition     1252376741.18355600   7.502141        51.47%
-------------------------------------------------------------
Code_Partition   1252376748.25592300   7.072367        48.52%
-------------------------------------------------------------
Stop             1252376748.25627400   0.000351         0.00%
-------------------------------------------------------------
total            -                     14.574859      100.00%
-------------------------------------------------------------
20000 rows inserted...

MySQL: 699 inserts per second
drizzle: 1372 inserts per second
As far as inserts go, drizzle is about 2 times faster out of the box than MySQL.