Living the startup life in Atlanta, GA.

In another long fought battle that eventually led to victory, we finally moved off TestTrack to JIRA Studio. Of course, now I got stuck with the task of figuring out how to get the open defects from one system to the other. Thankfully this ended up being somewhat un-painful. The Jira4R gem allows for easy creation of issues with just a few lines of Ruby. There are a few caveats to using this script. The documentation is almost non-existent and very out of date. It’s also not available on any standard gem repository.

In order to save another fellow developer the headaches I went through, I’ve published the source for my migration script on GitHub. It includes examples of how to use the Jira4r gem as well as installation instructions. Feel free to fork away and make it better!

For some reason, PostgreSQL is sorta a pain to get working on the Mac. Much of this is that the ports version does bizarre things, such as make all the directories you expect to have end with the Postgres version number. Once you install it, you have to go symlink a bunch of things just to make it work sensibly. To top it off, the way ports (used to, maybe not now) adds the Postgres user makes it so that it shows up on the login screen. The Mysql installs don’t do that. It’s odd to me that a database that’s some weird conglomeration of Oracle and Sun is easier to get up and running, but it’s true and annoying.

Apparently, my brainwaves have been radiating that annoyance somewhat strongly, and was picked up by a developer who appears to live right here in Atlanta. Andy Satori is maintaining PostgreSQL binary installers for mac. He’s also built a few lightweight gui tools to use along with Postgres, including a pretty decent Cocoa query tool:

Installing the package was easy and there’s no Postgres user on my login screen. Double win. If you want Postgres on your mac, this is definitely the way to go.

Making my Postgres filled evening even better, I didn’t even have to go through a series of elaborate contortions to get my gem to build. gem install postgres was all I needed.

To round out the Postgres post, check out this visualization on the PostgreSQL project commit history.

One Rails thing that has always felt just a bit un-rails like is deployment. There are a ton of solutions out there. I’ve used Lighttpd, fast-cgi, and mongrel proxied by Apache. Almost all of these have been tedious, a pain, and failure prone.

The Dutch have come to our rescue with Passenger (aka mod_rails). Passenger allows you to run your Rails apps natively within Apache. No need for proxies, mongrel clusters or anything else. They even claim that it recovers from server errors.

The best part is that it’s brain-dead simple. If you can execute a few lines on a command line and add a virtual host to Apache, you can host your Rails app in Passenger.