Installing mod_rails, upload_progress on OS X ☆

Setup Phusion Passenger (mod_rails) Apache module

• sudo gem install passenger
• copy the snippet from the terminal and into a file called /etc/apache2/other/passenger.conf
• Restart Apache – sudo apachectl restart

Install Passenger PreferencePane

This makes it really easy to create hosts for your Rails applications and configure mod_rails in System Preferences.

• Download Passenger PreferencePane
• Double click to install, have a play in System Preferences.

Install Upload Progress Apache module

• git clone http://github.com/drogus/apache-upload-progress-module.git
• cd apache-upload-progress-module
• sudo apxs -c -Wc,-arch -Wc,i386 -Wl,-arch -Wl,i386 -i -a mod_upload_progress.c
  • Change the architecture string (i386) if yours is different
  • This installs and enables the module in /etc/apache2/httpd.conf

The configurations that Passenger PreferencePane creates are put in /etc/apache2/passenger_pane_vhosts. To enable upload progress for a site edit the .conf file appropriate for your site and insert the below snippet just before the </VirtualHost> line.

  <IfModule upload_progress_module>
     <Location />
       # enable the tracking of uploads anywhere down from /
       TrackUploads On
     </Location>
     <Location /progress>
       # progress JSON will appear at /progress
       ReportUploads On
     </Location>
  </IfModule>

Reconfigure Passenger PreferencePane to insert upload_module configuration

The application I’m currently developing requires upload progress and Apache needs to be able to follow symbolic links as I have certain assets stored outside of the main Rails application. The default Passenger PreferencePane configuration does not include these options.

I’ve updated the file that creates this configuration in a forked github repository. Dependent on where you installed the PreferencePane this file will either be in

• ~/Library/PreferencePanes/Passenger.prefPane/Contents/Resources – Installed only for your user
• or /Library/PreferencePanes/Passenger.prefPane/Contents/Resources – Installed for all users

Download PassengerApplication.rb and copy this file and the above configuration will be created.

Thoughtbot Paperclip

Paperclip is a fantastic file attachment plugin. It just uses ImageMagick to do it’s image processing. As long as the executables are in your path image scaling just works. It’s a whole load easier than configuring RMagick.

However, none of my images were rescaling and were dumping a strange error saying that Paperclip couldn’t determine the type of my file. I spent an hour trying to work out what the problem was, then I realised… The ImageMagick commands weren’t in the path for Apache. I tried various things to get this working, but tracked it down to a setting that can be put in one of your environment files.

Paperclip.options[:command_path] = "/opt/local/bin"

A quick restart of Rails later and it’s all working. This is what Paperclip was chucking out to my the development log:

[paperclip] An error was received while processing: #<Paperclip::NotIdentifiedByImageMagickError: /tmp/stream.637.0 is not recognized by the 'identify' command.>