Publising Rails Plug-ins with Rake

Posted by Zak Mandhro Published in rails, ruby

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.

PLAIN TEXT

RUBY:

Rake::RailsPluginPackageTask.new(ProjectInfo[:name], ProjectInfo[:version]) do |p|
p.package_files = PluginPackageFiles
p.plugin_files = FileList["rails_plugin/**/*"]
p.extra_links = {"Project page"=>ProjectInfo[:homepage],
"Author: #{ProjectInfo[:author_name]}"=>ProjectInfo[:author_link]}
p.verbose = true
end
task :rails_plugin=>:clobber
desc "Publish Ruby on Rails plug-in on RubyForge"
task :release_plugin=>:rails_plugin do |task|
pub = Rake::SshDirPublisher.new("#{RubyForgeConfig[:user_name]}@rubyforge.org",
"/var/www/gforge-projects/#{RubyForgeConfig[:unix_name]}",
"pkg/rails_plugin")
pub.upload()
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.

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2 users responded in this post

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sean said in September 14th, 2006 at 6:14 pm

Wondering if ROXML project is active considering that there are no responses to questions posted there.

Apologies for dropping a note here.

mandhro said in September 16th, 2006 at 7:23 pm

Sean, I didn’t see the comments until today. Is there a bug you need fixed or feature missing? I have enabled Tracker on ROXML RubyForge project. I will try to accomodate change requests later this week. One of the things on my list is to add xml_text with xml_attribute.