The Love Shack » Rails

Making SSH easy

Alex — Mon, 05 May 2008 18:06:01 +0000

Tim Dysinger put up a great article the other day about simplifying Rails app deployment. He briefly goes over some of the SSH configuration options that you can use to simplify things, particularly when using ssh-agent. There are a few other things that I use to greatly simplify my life, particularly since I use ssh for almost all of my work, not just deployments.

Automatically load up ssh-agent and prepare your keys on login.
OSX and most Linux desktop environments (Gnome, KDE, etc) have a “keyring” that stores system passwords and things for you in a relatively secure fashion. You unlock the keyring with a master password and you get access to stored passwords. ssh-agent can interact with these keyrings to automatically load up your ssh keys at login. You just unlock the keyring once, and your keys are all ready to go.
Use short names in your .ssh/config
Sometimes you’ll be stuck working on servers with extremely long names. Or, worse yet, servers with no DNS name at all where you have to remember the IP address. In this case, you can use a host/hostname combination in your .ssh/config file to give you an easy to type name.
```
host = shortname
hostname = reallylong.nameplusdomain.com
```
And, for bonus points, if your current login name doesn’t match the remote login name, you can add a user = remotename line. Now, instead of typing:
ssh remotename@reallylong.nameplusdomain.com
I can just do:
ssh shortname
This last one is a potential security risk, but it can be handy when you’re deploying to a machine who’s host key changes regularly. I run into this all the time when preparing new release candidates of our Rails Boxcar images at work. I add stricthostkeychecking = no to my config. If I connect to the same server multiple times and it has a different host key (or no host key stored locally yet) I won’t have to manually approve it. Particularly handy in conjunction with Capistrano since cap will usually choke and exit with an error instead of prompting you with the “Add host key” message.

Working for The Man!

Alex — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 09:57:39 +0000

So, as of today, I have accepted an offer to work for The Man. Not The Man as in, “The Man is keeping us down”, but as in “You are The Man!”. Except, in this case, it’s more like The Company. Starting soon (hopefully Friday, if everything is ready to go) I’ll be working for Planet Argon. I’m being brought in as a sysadmin for their hosting operations. There are lots of really exciting opportunities going on here not only in the world of Ruby on Rails hosting in particular, but hosting services in general.

Companies like DreamHost have really redefined what one-click installations are all about, but I’m looking to take that further. Not just one-click hosting, but one-click virtual servers. Imagine filling out a form, submitting some billing info, and having a full-blown, ready to go virtual server available for your use (with root access to boot) within a few minutes.

With technologies like Xen allowing lightweight virtual machines, I’m hoping that we’ll soon be able to make this a reality. No more being confined to your $HOME, and trying to install software that isn’t supported by the hosting service within those confines. You’ll now be able to install software as it was MEANT to be installed, and just have it work.

With more and more Web 2.0 (is that cliché yet?) applications coming up, and with more and more developers designing said applications, it’ll be even more important to have an easy and reliable platform for hosting these applications. It’s obviously going to take some hard work and time to get it done, but I think it’ll really be a very positive step for the industry as a whole. Stay tuned for more about this.

Obviously, these are just my opinions and not the policy of Planet Argon, yadda, yadda. Same goes for any future work-related posts. But it’s a very exciting opportunity, and a very exciting time to be getting involved into this portion of the business.

Ruby on Rails Coding Setup

Alex — Thu, 15 Feb 2007 22:17:47 +0000

Now that I’ve gotten over the initial hump of learning enough Ruby (on Rails) to get some productive work done, here’s my list of quite-possibly-essential tools for the job:

Ruby (and Rails, if you’re doing web stuff)
Ruby Interactive Reference – Currently v1.8 (ri1.8 package in Debian)
A good text editor. I prefer Emacs for heavy coding, vim for quick edits. Whatever works best for you.
The Ruby Documentation Bundle from ruby-doc.org.
The Rails Framework Documentation (if you’re using rails). On a Debian system, this is part of the rails package. Look under /usr/share/doc/rails/html.
A fast, tabbed browser. Firefox/Iceweasel are just too slow for me, so I prefer Galeon. It’s not actively maintained anymore, but I currently have 68 tabs open in two windows, and the response time is instantaneous, so I’m happy.
This one may or may not apply to your situation, but for me it’s essential: a good music player and good music to go with it. Currently this is Audacious playing Gipsy Kings. YMMV.

I also use a few non-essential extras to make my life a bit simpler.

Beryl is excellent for multiple desktops and transparent windows. Multiple desktops are easy enough, but transparent windows can really be handy when you’re trying to read things in one window while typing in another.
A good MySQL front-end. I personally rather like the MySQL Query Browser. It’s light, easy to use, and does all of its work through queries that I can edit, so I don’t have to keep a separate shell window open for manual tasks.
A tabbed terminal for multiple connections to the remote machine I’m working on. I just use gnome-terminal for this though there probably are better alternatives out there.
Oh, and most importantly, a Debian system to run all of this stuff on.

Get a setup like that going and you too, can be Cool Like Me ™. Well, ok, not really. Nobody can really be as cool as me. Or maybe they just don’t want to… hmm…