Checkvist Pro plan

After a long silence, we've finally released Checkvist Pro plan. The detailed post about this is available.

With this release, I've also upgraded Rails to the version 2.3.3 and migrated Mysql database from MyISAM to InnoDB engine (because we've had problems with data consistency when transactions were interrupted).

So far so good, performance haven't become worse. And I'm pretty satisfied with upgrade of the app engine from mongrel cluster to Nginx Passenger.

Now will focus on the daily work and on adding more features to Checkvist.

Migration of Checkvist to Rails 2.3

I decided to migrate Checkvist to new and fresh Rails 2.3 (or 2.3.2, to be more specific).

I cannot say I really need features from 2.3, but I think it worth using the latest release (especially given that I already had to patch my Rails 2.2.2 installation to remove some bugs from it).

As usual, the migration turns to be an adventure:

• Change all tests which extend Test::Unit::TestCase and use fixtures with ActiveSupport::TestCase
  
• Many test failures were fixed by adding self.use_transactional_fixtures = false to test_helper.rb
  
• Fixed tests with cookies (see a good post with the explanation)
  
• Faced a bug with cookie escaping in tests. This bug is not fixed in 2.3.2, so some tests are failing unless edge 2.3.x is used.
  
• DEPRECATION: formatted_ paths had to be replaced. Replaced.
  
• DEPRECATION: session.delete => session.clear
  
• DEPRECATION: session.session_id => request.session_options[:id] (faced another already fixed bug)
  

Some of these issues are described in Rails 2.3 change log. And some (like bugs ;) are not.

So now, tests are successful again (for the latest 2.3 branch). But I'm not going to update production yet, will do some more testing. And, probably, wait for 2.3.3.

TeamCity 4.0 runs Checkvist's tests

I'm working on two projects: TeamCity - a rather popular continuous integration and build management server, and Checkvist - a simple and fast online outliner with task sharing and keyboard navigation.

I use Checkvist to plan my work on TeamCity, and recently I got a chance to use TeamCity to assist Checkvist development.

TeamCity recently reached its next milestone - 4.0 release. One of the interesting things it has is Rake build runner (so it can test Ruby and Rails projects).

You know, software must be tested before the release. So I tested this runner by creating a Checkvist build configuration in TeamCity. It happened to work so nice, that I couldn't resist to prepare a short and dirty demo. 

Definetely, I had to break some Checklist tests to demonstrate some cool TeamCity features :)

View demo on TeamCity developer blog 

How to run rake tasks for non-development rails environments

I’ve found that parameters passed to rake tasks in the form “name=value” are converted into the environment variables. This magic is done by rake itself when parsing command-line parameters. It has an interesting consequence – you can run some db-oriented rake tasks for any of your ruby on rails environments. For instance, to migrate your production database to the latest version you can run:

rake db:migrate RAILS_ENV=production

This knowledge is also useful when writing custom rake tasks; you can access environment variables using predefined ENV hash (you can also access rake command line parameters using ARGV hash).


rake ruby on rails ror rails