SVN Branching/tagging and Redmine integration
Thursday 6th November 2008Here at Head, we use Redmine for our issue-tracking and collaboration needs, and it’s truly great. We’ve now replaced Trac, which was also really good, but we’re finding that the multiple-projects support in Redmine really trumps the single-project-per-installation model of Trac.
The only problem we’ve run into so far with Redmine was a problem setting up SVN branches when using Redmine.pm, the Perl authentication module. Any attempt to branch a repo resulted in an Apache segfault and an explosion on the client-side. The relatively simple solution was to replace the apache2-mpm-worker module with the apache2-mpm-prefork module. I found this solution tucked away in the Redmine forums, but I figured I’d better make a note of it as the solution was a bit hard to find.
Getting on Rails Quickly for Debian-based systems
Monday 3rd November 2008Just to speed things up for anybody who needs it, here are the commands we use to get Rails sites working on a fresh Debian-based system.
[cc lang="bash"]sudo apt-get install ruby rdoc1.8 ri1.8 irb1.8 irb ruby1.8-dev build-essential mysql-server libmysql-ruby libmysqlclient15off libmysqlclient15-dev mysql-admin imagemagick librmagick-ruby libmagick9-dev libopenssl-ruby subversion git-core[/cc]
Next, go to http://rubyforge.org/frs/?group_id=126 and download the latest rubygems package (grab the .tar.gz file).
Extract it, and run
[cc lang="bash"]sudo ruby setup.rb[/cc]
When that finishes, you should be able to type
[cc lang="bash"]gem -v[/cc]
And get a version number (like 1.3.1 at present). If this doesn’t work, it may be the case that it installed as command “gem1.8″ (rather than “gem”). So we can fix this pretty easily:
[code]sudo ln -s /usr/bin/gem1.8 /usr/bin/gem[/code]
Lastly you can install all the commonly used gems we use here:
[code]gem sources -a http://gems.github.com
sudo gem install mongrel ruby-debug mysql mislav-will_paginate ferret
acts_as_ferret rmagick fastercsv rails capistrano rake[/code]
Head chosen for Digital Mission to New York
Thursday 11th September 2008
Head were one of 21 UK digital companies selected to go on this year’s government sponsored Digital Mission to New York. From 15th-19th September, Ramsey Khoury, Head’s MD, pitched the agency’s digital capabilities and latest innovations to top US investors and other VIPs.
For a nice little round up of article’s check out the following links..
Europe’s largest shoe retailer appoints Head
Monday 4th August 2008
Austrian company Leder & Schuh, owners of Europe’s largest shoe retailer brand, Humanic, have awarded Head the prestigious task of designing and building their flagship e-commerce site for the whole of Europe. News that can be legitimately described as Einfach wunderbar. The new site will be launching early 2009, housing Humanic’s spectacular range of 6,000 plus shoes. We have designed an interim site to keep everyone happy and on their toes in the run up to the main e-commerce site which can be found here.
Installing Phusion Passenger on Centos With a Custom Apache2
Monday 21st July 2008We’re currently running Apache2 on an old (and very stable) version of CentOS. It’s so ancient it didn’t come with Apache 2, so we’ve got it installed from source. Today we’re making the big move to running our Rails apps on Phusion Passenger (a.k.a mod_rails), but we ran into some problems with the compilation of the Apache module, mainly because passenger-install-apache2-module couldn’t figure out where any of the Apache development headers were. It’s a great installer but it can’t magically figure out where Apache’s keeping its development headers.
The solution was pretty simple, extracted from here and boiled down, it’s:
[code]export APXS2=/usr/local/apache/bin/apxs
export APR_CONFIG=/usr/local/apache/bin/apr-1-config[/code]
You may need to change the path depending on where you’ve got Apache installed.