This particular case assumes you use shared hosting.  That’s probably another bad thing, but whatever.  Also, you need access to your public_html folder’s .htaccess file.  In fact, this whole setup is so host-specific that you might find it worthless.

Starting over.  Shared host.  public_html folder. Apache. Your host routes traffic to your app by rewriting your requests via a proxy to a specific port.

Now let’s say you have the domain www.domain.com.  Your host does something like:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^domain.com$ [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.domain.com$

RewriteRule ^(.*)$ "http\:\/\/127\.0\.0\.1\:12%{REQUEST_URI}" [P,QSA,L]

Note: port numbers have been changed to protect the innocent.

This basically just says “if a request hits me and the host matches your domain, I’m gong to proxy it on to myself on a different port.”  The webserver runs a request against itself on a different port, which presumably is picked up by whatever handles your Rails application.

Well, you want your blog to be at http://www.domain.com/blog.  That unfortunately does contain your domain in the HTTP_HOST.  Which means Rails will try to serve up your blog.  Which means it will fail or, if you actually have your blog in your app’s public folder, will serve up your .php files as raw text downloads.

Solution:

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/blog/(.*)$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^domain.com$ [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.domain.com$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ "http\:\/\/127\.0\.0\.1\:12%{REQUEST_URI}" [P,QSA,L]

We add an additional condition to our rewrite requiring that the actual path requested (Apache’s REQUEST_URI expands to that) NOT match “/blog/” followed by pretty much anything.  This will get your webserver to handle all of these requests as if your Rails app weren’t there, which is what you’re going for anyway.

This isn’t limited to WordPress.  And note that whatever you are trying to run needs to be in your Apache DOCUMENT_ROOT folder.  That could be like “public_html” or something.  I don’t know the answer to that for you.  You CAN work around that with other directives, but that is beyond the scope of this entry.

*** extconf.rb failed ***

Go read:

http://blog.bmn.name/2008/02/rails-gem-install-mysql-throws-error-extconfrb-failed

http://www.tj-hd.co.uk/en-gb/languageswitcher/

Because if you want to use more than one language at a time on your computer you’re Doing It Wrong, because if you were doing it right, Apple would have provided a way to do it that way.

Astounding that this requires a 3rd-party application. Yes, it is possible to change the language in your document, but if you also use paragraph styles, they have a set languge.  And that set language doesn’t change when you set the language on the whole document.  And you can’t highlight the whole document of mixed languages and set the whole thing to one of them.  Usability at its finest.

Apple, some computer users do know how to operate computers.

/Users//config/../vendor/rails/railties/lib/initializer.rb:271:in `require_frameworks': can't activate rack (~> 1.0.1, runtime) for [], already activated rack-1.1.0 for ["thin-1.0.0"] (RuntimeError)
from /Users//config/../vendor/rails/railties/lib/initializer.rb:134:in `process'
from /Users//config/../vendor/rails/railties/lib/initializer.rb:113:in `send'
from /Users//config/../vendor/rails/railties/lib/initializer.rb:113:in `run'
from /Users//config/environment.rb:13
from /Library/Ruby/Site/1.8/rubygems/custom_require.rb:31:in `gem_original_require'
from /Library/Ruby/Site/1.8/rubygems/custom_require.rb:31:in `require'
from /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/thin-1.0.0/lib/rack/adapter/rails.rb:31:in `load_application'
from /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/thin-1.0.0/lib/rack/adapter/rails.rb:23:in `initialize'
... 6 levels...
from /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/thin-1.0.0/lib/thin/runner.rb:139:in `run!'
from /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/thin-1.0.0/bin/thin:6
from /usr/bin/thin:19:in `load'
from /usr/bin/thin:19

Disappointing to be sure, but there’s a simple fix I found here.  Thin will try to load the latest version of Rack that you have installed, but Rails specifically asks for 1.0.1.  You can’t have 2 versions of it running at the same time, so RubyGems pukes.

The simple solution is to uninstall Rack 1.1.0.  If that isn’t an option for you, dang.  There’s always this rails ticket you could go fix and make a big name for yourself in the community.

Big thanks to avit on this forum for the solution.

The point is that just starting a new job I figured a good thing to do was first run the unit tests to make sure I had set up the app properly. I was treated to many failures and investigated why. I found many failures caused by a polluted database. Previous tests weren’t cleaning up after themselves, so later tests had bad state (duplicate records and that sort of thing). While that may be a plug for database level enforcement of that kind of rule, that task was beyond the scope of what I was doing.

I scoured Google looking for answers, and a day later I finally found it. Just to stretch you along even further, here’s what it wasn’t:

• shoulda not running implicit teardowns
• transactional fixtures being turned off

No, it was a great deal dumber than that, and a thanks to Eric Artzt, whoever you are, for providing the solution. The table that was giving me fits is a MyISAM table, which doesn’t support transactions. Which means there are no rollbacks to clean up my DB state. Which means I either have to explicitly put calls to do that into an explicity-defined teardown method or switch the engine on the table in question.

MacBook-Pro-de-Ethan-Garofolo:~ juanpaco$ sudo gem install thin
Password:
Building native extensions. This could take a while...
ERROR: Error installing thin:
ERROR: Failed to build gem native extension.

/System/Library/Frameworks/Ruby.framework/Versions/1.8/usr/bin/ruby extconf.rb install thin
mkmf.rb can't find header files for ruby at /System/Library/Frameworks/Ruby.framework/Versions/1.8/usr/lib/ruby/ruby.h