Common Services

A thorough technical guide to writing nginx modules in C.

Primary English documentation site for nginx. Contains many links to sample configuration files and other help.

Walks through installing Ruby and Rails, as well as Postgres, via ports on Mac OS X Leopard. This is an alternative to using the default Leopard installation.

A guide for getting SQLite installed on windows. Important as the default Rails DB is currently set to sqlite3.

Handy guide looking at the results of the Yahoo yslow FireFox plugin and how to handle some of the performance issues using Ruby on Rails or web server (nginx) configuration tricks.

How to compile the mysql gem when using the Mac Ports install of MySQL and the native Mac OS X Leopard (10.5) Ruby and Rails (and gems) installs.

Log4r is a comprehensive and flexible logging library written in Ruby for use in Ruby programs. It features a hierarchical logging system of any number of levels, custom level names, logger inheritance, multiple output destinations, execution tracing, custom formatting, thread safteyness, XML and YAML configuration, and more.

From the README: BackgrounDRb is a ruby job server and scheduler. It main intent is to be used with Ruby on Rails applications for offloading long running tasks. Since a rails application blocks while servicing a request it is best to move long running tasks off into a background process that is divorced from the http request/response cycle.

Are you accepting sensitive user data? Passwords, credit card numbers, etc. By default, Rails stores all submitted parameters in plain text in the logs. This episode will show you how to filter this sensitive input so it doesn’t show up in the log file.

Httperf is a tool for measuring web server performance. It provides a flexible facility for generating various HTTP workloads and for measuring server performance. The focus of httperf is not on implementing one particular benchmark but on providing a robust, high-performance tool that facilitates the construction of both micro- and macro-level benchmarks.

The official site for the world’s most widely used web server.

github home of the action_mailer_optional_tls plugin. Use this plugin to connect to Google GMail from your Rails app. Pay attention to Googles TOU, as there are limits to the number of email messages you can send in one day.

mod_rails is an Apache module that supports Rails applications without requiring a separate application server. This could be the biggest thing in Rails hosting since Mongrel.

Links to precompiled binaries and source code for sqlite.

Apache 2 module that enables your application server to tell Apache when to send a static file. Use with Rails Xsendfile plugin.

Rails database adapter that supports replicated MySQL databases.

Manages any SQLite database on your computer.

Ruby bindings for SQLite

You need a JDBC driver for SQLite if you want to use the Netbeans IDE database service UI.

A web server alternative that claims twice the performance of Apache.

Doesn’t appear to have been updated in a while, but still lots of logging/analysis tools to check out.

Good overview of what EXPLAIN is, how its results are calculated, and what all of the data is presents means.

Presentation slides, recording, and quick reference for Httperf talk at www2007 conference.