3. Railties

Environments have received some cleanup. The old config/environments/shared.rb was moved to config/environment.rb and contains most of the boilerplate code to set up the project. In the environments directory you can now find

    config/environments/production.rb 
    config/environments/development.rb 
    config/environments/test.rb 

The default environment is now development and contains the new automatic dependency reloading.

Since the default environment is now development we introduced a ENV system variable to choose which rails environment to choose. The reason behind this is that you can now use the same source code on your production side and on your develop machine. If you use webrick on your production machine you can tell it to run in production mode using the -e parameter

/script/server -e production -i mystartupcontroller

if you use CGI or mod_ruby you can use the apache SetEnv directive either server wide or in your virtual server subgroup

SetEnv RAILS_ENV production

Fastcgi needs some extra treatment since ENV variables are not passed on to FastCGI childrens at startup. Here is a working server wide example:

FastCgiConfig -initial-env RAILS_ENV=production -restart

Alternatively you can set it only for a certain application like this:

FastCgiServer /var/www/applications/myapp/public/dispatch.fcgi -initial-env RAILS_ENV=production

There is now breakpoint support through the script/breakpointer client. This means that you can break out of execution at any point in the code, investigate and change the model, AND then resume execution! Example:

    class WeblogController < ActionController::Base
      def index
        @posts = Post.find_all
        breakpoint "Breaking out from the list" 
      end
    end

So the controller will accept the action, run the first line, then present you with a IRB prompt in the breakpointer window.

Here you can do things like:

  
  Executing breakpoint "Breaking out from the list" at .../webrick_server.rb:16 in 'breakpoint'

    >> @posts.inspect
    => "[#<Post:0x14a6be8 @attributes={\"title\"=>nil, \"body\"=>nil, \"id\"=>\"1\"}>, 
         #<Post:0x14a6620 @attributes={\"title\"=>\"Rails you know!\", \"body\"=>\"Only ten..\", \"id\"=>\"2\"}>]" 
    >> @posts.first.title = "hello from a breakpoint" 
    => "hello from a breakpoint" 

...and even better is that you can examine how your runtime objects actually work:

    >> f = @posts.first 
    => #<Post:0x13630c4 @attributes={"title"=>nil, "body"=>nil, "id"=>"1"}>
    >> f.
    Display all 152 possibilities? (y or n)

Finally, when you’re ready to resume execution, you press CTRL-D

Default session options can now be set in config/environment.rb or even in a specific environment in config/environments/.

As an example, to set a custom prefix you would add the following to config/environment.rb:

ActionController::CgiRequest::DEFAULT_SESSION_OPTIONS.update(:prefix => 'my_prefix.')