I’ve added a guide over at Kete.net.nz for how to install Kete for development on Mac OS X. You can find hit here:

http://kete.net.nz/documentation/topics/show/16-creating-a-kete-development-environment-on-mac-os-x

If anything doesn’t work for you, please let me know.

Cheers,
Walter

I’m going to outline how to set up Aquamacs for my IRC requirements with the built in ERC emacs IRC client so that it automates joining the server and channels I want, with some other bells and whistles (the bell part, literally!). All of these steps have .emacs file equivalent, so you could use it as a starting pointing point for figuring out how to set them, even if you don’t use Aquamacs (Mac OS X GUI emacs).

Here are the steps:
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Personally, I like a highly portable text editor that is powerful enough to use as an IDE. TextMate, from what I hear, is pretty darn great, but by being limited to only Macs, TextMate doesn’t cut it for me. Emacs being emacs, it is quite possible to set it up to be as nice if not nicer than TextMate for Rails development. A good overview can be found at http://www.credmp.org/index.php/2006/11/28/ruby-on-rails-and-emacs/.

And WOW is emacs 22’s Tramp for remote file editing via SSH/SCP awesome! More on that at the end of this post.
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People are moving away from managing their Rails plugins with svn externals towards Piston’s easy vendor branch management approach.

But what if you want to use Piston’s easy version of Subversion’s vendor branch management for dealing with the code for an entire Rails application based on an open source project like Mephisto, Collaboa, or in my case Kete? (more…)

From a howto on Robby on Railshere. You’ll want to read http://www.rubyinside.com/advent2006/12-piston.html for more commands and reasons to go this route.
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I have a host where Nginx listens on port 80 and dishes out requests to various apps depending on what their host name is. It also does appropriate load balancing. Primarily I use this for hosting various instances of Kete Ruby on Rails apps, but I also use it for supporting the subversion repository under Apache and a few other RoR apps, too. I wanted to setup up web log statistics for all of the above and I wanted to do it in such a way that it’s easy to add another web app to view statistics for.

Awstats is wicked easy to setup if you live in the LAMP world, but I could find a decent tutorial that covered my setup. So here goes… (more…)

This assumes that you have already installed things outlined here.

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This assumes you have already installed the subversion package by following the directions outlined here.

Install Apache2 and mod_dav_svn

In my case, I already had something running on port 80 (nginx handling requests to various app servers), so apache2 was set to “NO_START to 1 in /etc/default/apache2″. I’ll get back to that later when we configure /etc/apache2/ports.conf so that our apache2 instance is just another app server behind nginx.

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Background

In my case I set up my project’s repository when I was very new to Subversion. Rather than try to figure out the why’s and how’s of using the conventional directory structure of repository-for-project/trunk and repository-for-project/branches I decided to go bare bones. I ended up with my project’s trunk code essentially living in repository-for-project/.

Now that I’m approaching the first release of the project’s code, I have a better understanding of Subversion’s implementation of branching, and I need to move repository to some place publically accessible, I’ve decided to switch to the trunk/branches/tags convention that so many other project’s use.

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Man, I miss the old “Late Night with David Letterman” of the 80’s sometimes…

Alright, to the point. Ruby on Rails makes it extremely easy to generate nicely formed XML from your application, especially if you are simple doing something like the following:

 def show
    @topic = Topic.find(params[:id])
    respond_to do |format|
      format.html
      format.xml { render  ml => @topic.to_xml }
    end
  end

If the request is for XML version of the topic, this will take all the attributes of a topic and make them into well formed XML. Nifty, but this doesn’t provide fine-grained control of the XML output which is what I need. RXML templates to the rescue:

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