Publising Rails Plug-ins with Rake
Problem: The Ruby on Rails plug-in installer's RecursiveHTTPFetcher makes certain assumptions about web servers that does not hold true from server to server. For example, it assumes:
- The web server has "file browsing" enabled
- All links to plug-in files are relative
- Folder links end with a forward slash
RubyForge web server is an example of where these assupmtions don’t hold true. As a result, you can not simply copy your files to a web server and expect Rails HTTP plugin installer to just work.
Solution: Rails Plug-in Package Task
RailsPluginPackageTask is a Rake task designed to automate the publishing of Ruby on Rails plug-ins. It helps fill the gap by conforming to the Rails plug-in script's assumptions. Following the Rake package task conventions, it defines the "rails_plugin" task that recurses through your package_files, generates compliant index.html for each folder (that contains a file), and creates a directory structure that you can publish as a set for your plugin.
Example
The following example uses the Rake::RailsPluginPackageTask to create the package. It then uses the Rake::SshDirPublisher to publish the plugin directory to RubyForge.
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Rake::RailsPluginPackageTask.new(ProjectInfo[:name], ProjectInfo[:version]) do |p|
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p.package_files = PluginPackageFiles
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p.plugin_files = FileList["rails_plugin/**/*"]
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p.extra_links = {"Project page"=>ProjectInfo[:homepage],
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"Author: #{ProjectInfo[:author_name]}"=>ProjectInfo[:author_link]}
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p.verbose = true
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end
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task :rails_plugin=>:clobber
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desc "Publish Ruby on Rails plug-in on RubyForge"
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task :release_plugin=>:rails_plugin do |task|
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pub = Rake::SshDirPublisher.new("#{RubyForgeConfig[:user_name]}@rubyforge.org",
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"/var/www/gforge-projects/#{RubyForgeConfig[:unix_name]}",
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"pkg/rails_plugin")
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pub.upload()
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end
You can download the ZIP package for this task and place it in your gems or project folder. For a complete working example, checkout ROXML from CVS.
Note: This release has only been tested on Linux. If it doesn't work on your OS, please let me know.
Wondering if ROXML project is active considering that there are no responses to questions posted there.
Apologies for dropping a note here.
Comment by sean — September 14, 2006 @ 6:14 pm