Articles tagged 'rails'

Digging Into the Rails Source

You’ve made it mostway through your free Ruby on Rails Internals class. Today we’ll be poking around the Rails source code. If you have money but not time, Rebuilding Rails lets you find a lot quickly… But in case you have more time, we’ll see where in the Rails source you can learn the same things...

Web Servers and Application Servers

A reader recently asked me why Ruby web app deploys usually have a web server (NGinX, Apache) and an application server (Unicorn, Thin, Puma, Racer, Mongrel, Passenger, Jakarta, TorqueBox or whatever I’ve forgotten this week).

Actually, he asked, “why do I need to run NGinX and Unicorn?” It’s a fair...

Understanding the Structure of Rails

Ruby on Rails is divided into several separate pieces. If you know what they are and what they do, you can use them individually. You can also look up documentation more easily, and you’ll know where to look for source code to a particular method, and which of several similarly-named methods does...

Rack and Session Store

A fellow asked me how he could store information per-user in Rack. This was my (brief) response:


Generally with the cookies object. Specifically, Rack has a “session”, which encodes a session identity into the cookies object, usually with some or all of your data.

You can also map from the session...

No More Requires

I hate all the “requires” at the front of Ruby files. I know what methods I’m using, but I have to write it in both places. Not exactly DRY. Rails skips them — you just use the classes you want. How can I automatically load my files like Rails does? Read on.

Ruby has method_missing. When you call...

What is Rack?: A Primer

If you do Ruby web programming, you’ll often hear about “Rack.” You might hear about it from a Ruby dev you respect, and that you won’t get better at Ruby web stuff until you know what’s underneath.

Or you might have to write a config.ru to use Heroku and you’re thinking, “what’s config.ru?”. It...

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