Ubuntu running low on disk space

June 11, 2016

Linux RVM

Warnings have been popping up with increasing frequency that the disk space is running low on Ubuntu running on VMware Workstation 12 Player. Even creating a backup failed due to lack of space in the Tempfolder. It’s time to do some clean up. Run Disk Usage Analyser toidentify where the problems are: usr/srcfolder - 2.4 GB, contained folders like linux-headers-3.13.0-32 that go back years. home/.rvmfolder grew to 6GB, in which the worst offender was the current gemset, at 2. ... Read more

Action Cable: components checklist

January 27, 2016

Rails 5.0 Actioncable

Here are the minimum code changes required to provide websocket capability in a Rails 5.0.0 app. This is based on a minimal alert app. Disclaimer: Of course this is all rapidly changing in Rails. This was correct for rails master branch at the time of writing this post. Prerequisites: gemfile: add em-hiredis, redis, and make sure you have puma 2.15.3 or greater ... gem 'rails', '>= 5.0.0.beta1.1' gem 'em-hiredis' gem 'redis' gem 'puma', '>= 2. ... Read more

Rails 5 tutorial chat app - can we deploy it to AWS?

December 30, 2015

ActionCable Elastic Beanstalk Rails 5.0 Websockets AWS Deployment Redis

The simple chat example that DHH built in his recent screencast using ActionCable in Rails 5, is available on GitHub here: https://github.com/HectorPerez/chat-in-rails5. But can we get this working on an Elastic Beanstalk single instance - with no load balancer ? => Initially yes, then no, then yes! On a development pc:Action Cable works with redis so to run the chat app you will need to install redis on your local machine: ... Read more

Upgrading to Rails 5.0.0.beta1

December 21, 2015

AWS PostgreSQL Elastic Beanstalk Rails 5.0 Rspec-rails

What we did to upgrade a small Rails app from Rails 4.2.5 to Rails 5.0.0.beta1. Now the upgrade is deployed in AWS, here is where we are at: When deploying, remember to change the secret key base to invalidate all sessions. ( or your users will get a nasty 500 error ) Temporarily removed NewRelic from the gemfile – it doesn’t currently support Rails 5.0.0.beta1. (UPDATE: as of 11 Feb NewRelic supports Rails 5. ... Read more

Scaling down to single instance Elastic Beanstalk.

April 13, 2015

Deployment Load balancer AWS Elastic Beanstalk SSL/TLS Linux

When you are looking to reduce your AWS costs, you might consider removing the Load balancer. At $20 per month it accounts for a large proportion of the hosting costs for a small application. Is it really needed right now? Down the line when your application grows, you can easily bring it back - right? Elastic beanstalk is handy for provisioning and deployment, and thankfully the load balancer is not compulsory. ... Read more

Rails 4.2.1 upgrade ( SMTP email sending fail)

March 27, 2015

AWS Email Elastic Beanstalk PostgreSQL

Soon after we updated to Rails 4.2.1 from 4.2.0 deployed - the site stopped respondingand we saw this error in the passenger log: phusion_passenger/preloader_shared_helpers.rb:69:in `fork': Cannot allocate memory - fork That was also the last time emails were successfully sent from Elastic Beanstalk. Now SMPT emails are silently failingwith no clues in the logs. We were unsure if the memory issue was with this AWS instance or this update. Later decided it was the instance. ... Read more

Moving Rails development from Windows to Linux

February 23, 2015

Windows Elastic Beanstalk PostgreSQL Rails 4.2 AWS Linux Ubuntu WSL2

Recently we embarked on a new feature requiring a gem that is not compatible with Windows. see also: [Moving Rails Development to Windows WSL 2 Linux] (/post/moving-rails-development-to-windows-wsl2-linux/). To re-quote a quote from https://meta.discourse.org/t/bundle-install-fails-on-windows/6494 : “The reality is that Ruby, as used by most Rails apps is full of unixism, performance of Ruby MRI (the default Ruby) on Windows is abysmal, Rails load times are hellish, sooner or later (more likely sooner) you are going to hit gems that simply do not work properly on Windows. ... Read more

Configuring HTTPS for the AWS Elastic Beanstalk Load balancer

January 19, 2015

AWS Deployment Elastic Beanstalk Load balancer SSL/TLS

Switching your Rails site to always use HTTPS takes a bit configuring. Here is how we followed AWS’s 3 high level steps: http://docs.aws.amazon.com/ElasticLoadBalancing/latest/DeveloperGuide/ssl-server-cert.html Create a custom domain with your DNS provider. Create and upload an SSL certificate to AWS Identity and Access Management (AWS IAM). Update your Elastic Beanstalk environment to use HTTPS. Step 1) was DONE - We already had our own www.ourdomain.com, not registered on AWS route 53 nor using the AWS route 53 name servers, but with godaddy. ... Read more

Upgrading to Ruby 2.1.4, from 1.9.3

January 2, 2015

Deployment Ruby 2.1.4 AWS Elastic Beanstalk Performance PostgreSQL Rails 4.2 Windows

Now that Rails 4.2.0 is out and several things have aligned, we took the plunge to upgrade to Ruby 2.1.4 from 1.9.3. We had already upgraded to Rails 4.2.0. Upgrading ruby was fairly straightforward, and we improved the AWS deployment in the process: faster updates & DB no longer tied to EB. Here are the steps we took: The plan was to create a whole new AWS EB environment using the latest 2014. ... Read more

Background processing on the cheap.

October 27, 2014

ActiveJob AWS Background Processing Performance Elastic Beanstalk Optimization Rails 4.2 Sucker Punch

We recently upgraded to Rails 4.2.0.beta2 to take advantage of the new Active Job framework and other improvements. We chose Sucker Punch to avoid the cost of using a separate worker on Elastic Beanstalk, along with Fist Of Fury for scheduling ( which we ended up not using ). So we introduced active jobs to spawn threads for anything that takes time, like emails, external API calls, and heavy DB processing. ... Read more