Where to start

Ruby
1

Hi,

I found there are some Ruby programs are running in this development
machines. Now I need to add some functionality into the Ruby program,
but I don’t know where to look into its starting program or its main
body of the program.

in aparche/httpd.conf file:

SSL Virtual Host Context

FastCgiServer /www/apps/scripts/public/dispatch.fcgi -idle-timeout 90
-initial-env RAILS_ENV=production -processes 10

Here is the dispatch.fcgi script:
require File.dirname(FILE) + “/…/config/environment”
require ‘fcgi_handler’

RailsFCGIHandler.process!

I got stuck. I don’t know how does this dispatch.fcgi program invoke
which ruby main program…

Can anyone please shed some light on me?

Thanks
S

2

Pet,

It seems you have a Ruby on Rails web app running on your machine. The
dispatch.fcgi file is, as its name says, a dispatcher for your rails
app and it’s handled by your apache’s mod_fcgi.

Hope it helps.

Thiago

3

Thiago J. wrote:

Pet,

It seems you have a Ruby on Rails web app running on your machine. The
dispatch.fcgi file is, as its name says, a dispatcher for your rails
app and it’s handled by your apache’s mod_fcgi.

Hope it helps.

Thiago

Hi in the same directory as the dispatch.cgi file, I also found a file
dispatch.rb a ruby script file. But I don’t know how this both
dispatch.cgi and dispatch.rb file are related.
In the dispatch.cgi file, what command/ruby script does it dispatched?
The dispatch.rb file has the following implementation:

less dispatch.rb

#!/usr/local/bin/ruby18

require File.dirname(FILE) + “/…/config/environment” unless
defined?(RAILS_ROOT)

If you’re using RubyGems and mod_ruby, this require should be changed

to an absolute path one, like:

“/usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/rails-0.8.0/lib/dispatcher” –

otherwise performance is severely impaired
require “dispatcher”

ADDITIONAL_LOAD_PATHS.reverse.each { |dir| $:.unshift(dir) if
File.directory?(dir) } if defined?(Apache::RubyRun)
Dispatcher.dispatch

Thanks
S

4

On 10/9/06, Pet F. [email protected] wrote:

Thanks

Can anyone please shed some light on me?

As was said before, you have a rails application. It’s not neccessary
to dive into deep parts of the code. You’d rather read some tutorial
on rails, so you know how to write models, controllers, views and
helpers. That way you’ll faster see the forest, instead of individual
trees :wink: When you’ll know this, you can find the appropriate stuff,
judging by the url that you call.

small hints:

  1. all the interesting stuff is in the app directory. urls are sent to
    controllers - /controller (=class)/action (=method)/all other
    parameters
  2. most of the things you see are in views, the common parts are
    shared in laayouts
  3. the data are in models