A New RHG Developer's Illustrated Primer

Part of the Gem-based Development Process series

*****

Dan had just completed his last project and was looking for another job where he can apply his skills in Rails and AJAX, when he run into a blog discussing challenges of an enterprise RoR-based application. He never worked on a large-scale Rails project so he was eager to try. He applied to a position at Revolution Health Group and after going through series of interviews, received an offer. People he talked to on campus, and his own scrutinizing of the web-site on which he was supposed to work, made him decide to accept the offer. He started on Monday.

Now it's Wednesday. Dan has spent his first two days at RHG reading the development's wiki, talking to coworkers, and configuring his new development workstation, a MacBook Pro. He was just assigned a bug, so he is eager to prove that he was the right choice for a job.

First, he decides to install a copy of one of the applications (rop) locally. Armed with instructions from wiki, he installs the deployment support tools:

$ gem install rhg_deployment --remote --source http://gems.revolutionhealth.com:8808

He now has two new commands - rhg and rhgcontrol. He sets up a runtime environment for the application:

$ rhgcontrol setup
Setting up the runtime environment
mkdir -p /opt/rhg/applications/etc
mkdir -p /opt/rhg/applications/tmp
...
mkdir -p /opt/rhg/applications/log

He downloads the latest version of the application with all its dependencies to his workstation:

$ rhg update rop
Bulk updating Gem source index for: http://gems.revolutionhealth.com:8808
Installing [ actionwebservice, 1.1.6 ]
Installing [ activesupport, 1.3.1 ]
Installing [ rails, 1.1.6 ]
...
Installing [ rhg_ui, 1.5.40766 ]
Installing [ rhg_migrations, 1.0.37541 ]
Installing [ rop, 1.4.40837 ]

Dan has all he needs now so he deploys the application, converting it from a static gem to a live site:

$ rhg deploy rop
Deploying rop-1.4.40837
Loading /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/rop-1.4.40837/config/deployment/database.yml as database.yml
Executing: ln -nfs /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/rop-1.4.40837 /opt/rhg/applications/rop
...
Executing: ln -nfs /opt/rhg/applications/log/rop log

It is a rails app, so it needs a DB which he creates using mysqladmin. He then issues a command to add a structure and populate with data his development DB:

$ rhgcontrol migrate rop
Running migrations for rop
cd /opt/rhg/applications/rop
Executing: rake db:migrate
...

Dan plans to use both lighttpd and mongrel to host the application, but first he goes with the default one, lighttpd, using a config supplied with the deployment tools:

$ rhgcontrol add rop
Adding lighttpd configuration for rop_8001

$ rhgcontrol start rop
Executing on rop_8001
Executing: /usr/sbin/lighttpd -f /opt/rhg/applications/etc/rop_8001.conf

Dumping the runtime manifest

He points his browser to http://localhost:8001 and plays with the application. He feels like doing some coding. He checks out the latest application code from subversion and runs mongrel from the top of the source tree:

$ mongrel_rails start -d

He fixes some code and navigates his browser to http://localhost:3000 to see the changes. It works but he needs to do some more fixes, this time in a shared component rhg_ui. He checks out the latest component code, sym-links it to the vendor/plugin directory of the application making it temporarily a plugin, and changes some code to see the immediate result. The bug is resolved, and, after running unit tests, he checks in the modified code for both the application and the component.

The changes he made are in a latent state. They are in the source tree but no gems were built off them yet. Dan knows that QA usually builds application gems off the latest code but not component ones. He decides to build a gem for rhg_ui himself. He navigates to the top of the component source tree and runs a command to tag, build, package, and publish the component as a gem to our local gem server:

$ rhg publish
...
Committed revision 40967.
...
Checking out tag to /tmp/rhg_ui-1.5.40966
Changing directory to /tmp/rhg_ui-1.5.40966
Building gem from tag
...
Successfully installed rhg_ui, version 1.5.40966
Pushing gem to development gem server via rhg tool: rhg push rhg_ui
Bulk updating Gem source index for: http://gems.revolutionhealth.com:8808
Bulk updating Gem source index for: http://gems.revolutionhealth.com:8808/archive
SSH User: dsmith
SSH Password: XXXXXXX
Publishing gems...
...
Refreshing the gem server indexes at /opt/rhg/gems

His changes are now packaged and ready to be picked up by QA for testing and pushing to production. How that part is done is for another time...