Forum: Ruby on Rails Need some super-noob help with some concepts

Hello all!  I'm new to actually *building* anything with these little
fragments of programming knowledge that I cobbled together, so I'm 
hoping
someone can give me a push in the right direction.

I'm working on building a 'utility' rails site that will only be used by
myself and one or two coworkers.  I'm not concerned with security (it 
will
be a local webserver only), appearance, etc.  I just need one thing to
work.  The plan is this:

I have remote jobsites that will report back to our server via a small 
ftp
file. For now it will just send us their WAN IP, but I plan on expanding
this once I figure out the overall structure of what the heck I'm trying 
to
do. :)  I want to be able to go to the local Rails webserver and see a 
list
of all our jobsites with a list of their WAN IPs and last updated times.

So... I have the FTP side working.  I have the rudimentary Rails 'site'
working, and I can manually enter jobsite info at the 
localhost:3000/sites
URL.  I need to automate the process of parsing each FTP file and adding 
it
to the database.  The parsing I can work out, but I am clueless on how 
to
even begin updating this 'app' from a script that is 'outside' of the 
Rails
app...if that makes sense.

I can run a script that parses the FTP file, but what approach do I take 
to
get the parsed info INTO the database?

There are probably 100 ways to do this and I know 0 of them. :)

Thanks!
Jim S

( the issue I'm having right now is that since I don't even know what
concept to use, I have to research different ways to do 'it', then I 
have
to learn how to do 'it #1', then I go off on that tangent for a while,
figure out it's not what I want, go back to researching other methods, 
then
have to learn how to do 'it #2', go off in that direction for a while, 
etc.
 I can tell you that I've learned more USEFUL programming knowledge over
the past month now that I have something to work on than I have in the 
past
2 years doing random online tutorials and classes and having no 
real-world
application for it... )

On 8 December 2012 02:57, Jim Stolzenbach <jkstolzenbach@gmail.com> 
wrote:
> file. For now it will just send us their WAN IP, but I plan on expanding
>
> I can run a script that parses the FTP file, but what approach do I take to
> get the parsed info INTO the database?
>
> There are probably 100 ways to do this and I know 0 of them. :)

You could run a Rake task to update the db.  The proper way to do this
would be to write a rake task, but the easiest way to get going would
be to use the provided rake task db:seed.  This runs the file
db/seeds.rb in the context of the application, so that all the
ActiveRecord stuff is automatically available.  To run the rake task
you just
cd /path/to/rails/application
rake db:seed
or if you want it to run on the production db
RAILS_ENV=production rake db:seed
which could be run from a cron task or whatever is appropriate.

So all you need do is to put your code in db/seeds.rb and you will be
up and running.

Colin