Tag: Heroku

Generating PDF from HTML using DocRaptor on Heroku

There comes a time one has to create PDFs for a Rails application. Searching the web will most likely bring you to libraries like PDF Kit and Wicket PDF that use wkhtmltopdf as a driver.

If your app is hosted on Heroku you wonder weather wkhtmltopdf is available so that you can use one of these awesome libraries. Searching the Heroku docs, you will probably come to same conclusion: nothing on there!

As the Heroku support states:
You’re correct that there’s no official documentation. Most of our customers seem to be using wkhtmltopdf, generally with pdfkit. I do hope to document this usage soon.

http://github.com/jdpace/PDFKit
http://code.google.com/p/wkhtmltopdf/

If you want us to offer a Prince add-on, I encourage you to write them inviting them to check out our Add-on Provider Programme: http://addons.heroku.com/provider

Of course, you can always purchase your own license and run it on EC2 or another server of your choosing.

PrinceXML

One of the libraries that were used at my last job was PrinceXML, which did a great jog generating PDFs from HTML pages. It supports most of the HTML and CSS stuff, passing the ACID2 test. PrinceXML has some additional CSS attributes that enable you to configure additional PDF specific layout settings.

DocRaptor

Since PrinceXML is a commercial product, Heroku won’t support it and I did not find anything on the web, that would offer PDF generation as a service. Asking the PrinceXML Forum I found out about DocRaptor. These guys provide a service to convert HTML to XLS or PDF over a webservice interface, extactly what I was looking for. As an additional bonus, they just implemented a gem for supporting the Heroku Add-on interface. Mail to Expected Behavior Support if you want to participate in the private beta.

Improvements

DocRaptor offers a great service, but they are still in early development. There were some Issues that were resolved recently. If you are a user of PrinceXML you probably know the —baseurl option that allows usage of relative paths for images and stylesheets. DocRaptor adds support for command line options just yet. The feature for generating a PDF from a given URL is even better!

Using DocRaptor from Rails

The latest DocRaptor documentation for the Heroku Add-on is decent and it provides some nice examples.

PDF from raw HTML

Here is what I did to get it running on my Rails 3 project:

# Gemfile
gem "doc_raptor", "0.1.1"

# mime_types.rb
Mime::Type.register_alias "application/pdf", :pdf

# your_controller.rb
def your_pdf_action
  respond_to do |format|
    format.pdf do
      data = DocRaptor.create(:name => 'DocRaptor.pdf', :document_content => render_to_string, :document_type => "pdf", :prince_options => {:baseurl => 'http://nofail.de'})
      send_data data, :type => 'application/pdf', :filename => 'DocRaptor.pdf'
    end
  end
end

If you registered the pdf mime-type you will have to provide an additional layout for this. I added some PrinceXML specific parameters to the styles to make it a fullscreen PDF. One thing that is essential for making the stylesheets work is the media => ‘screen, print’ settings:

// application.pdf.haml
= stylesheet_link_tag 'style', :media => 'screen, print'
// you can provide a base tag for images and stylesheets
// %base{:url=>'http://blog.nofail.de'}

%style
  @page { size: A4 }
  @page { margin: 0px }
  @page { border: none }
  @page { padding: 0px }
  @page { prince-shrink-to-fit: auto }

PDFs from an URL

The simplest solution for generating a PDF is to send an url to the service, so you can re-use all your view logic:

data = DocRaptor.create(:name => "DocRaptor.pdf", :document_url => "http://blog.nofail.de", :document_type => "pdf")
send_data data, :type => 'application/pdf', :filename => "DocRaptor.pdf"

One caveat though, you got to have at least two dynos to serve the additional request from DocRaptor!

See a working example on my homepage.

Generating PDF form HTML without the hassle, thanks to DocRaptor!

DZone API and iPhone app

As I already mentioned, I am currently getting my hands dirty with Objective-C and iPhone application development.

The biggest problem with getting started was that I had no idea what application I could write for that device that could become somewhat usable. As I am a passionate tech reader, I consume a lot of articles posted on DZone. Usually I use a feed reader like NetNewsWire for that, which works very well for my MacBook but is nearly useless on the iPhone, because the DZone site is not very mobile friendly…

Problems

Since there was no DZone iPhone application on the marked I started working on it. Parsing DZone feeds was easy, even though the buildin XML support on iOS sucks. There were some nice libraries that made my life easier.

No deeplink

The DZone RSS feed does not provide a deeplink to the actual linked article, so one would still land on the DZone page… Since DZone does not provide an API currently, I started working on my own Rails application hosted on Heroku. Spidering the RSS, calling the page and extracting the link to the article is fragile, but it works (currently).

No voting

One of my goals was to let the iPhone user vote for the article while reading it. The lack of an API forced me to do some more fragile login and posting stuff to the DZone page, but it works too (currently)!

You can read more about the API I created on the actual page.

iPhone app

The first version of the “dzone mobile” app has passed the iTunes store review process and is available through the app store. A version with some minor bugfixes is currently beeing reviewed. Have a look at updates and documentation here or here.

voting

You have got to provide your DZone login credentials if you want to use the voting feature. Go to the iPhone Settings > DZone and add your username and password. I want you to know that there is NO SSL, so your credentials will be submitted UNSECURE!

more Features

If you are interested in pushing this further, you can add bug reports or feature requests on GitHub.

screenshots

DZone iPhone sugar!

Using the Redis addon on Heroku

I am always playing around with new addons offered by Heroku. My latest discovery was the Redis addon that is provided by Redistogo. The addon is probably in private beta (docs are still on beta), but since they put up a link to it on their site, I managed to install it to my personal website that runs in the cloud.

Redis is “an advanced key-value store” and has some features that make it a perfect match for a cache! I use caching extensively on my site and keep on trying out new ways to do it to circumvent Heroku’s readonly filesystem.

Like Memcache, Redis provides the ability to set a time to live (ttl) on a key. This comes in handy, if you have data that expires in a short period of time, like 3rd party data from Twitter etc.

Caching with Redis

Accessing Redis is very simple, since it is a text based protocol. The command reference is straight forward and there is a simple Ruby wrapper available:

require "redis"
redis = Redis.new
redis.set "foo", "bar"
# => "OK"
redis.get "foo"
# => "bar"

The redis-store gem already provides a Rails 3 compatible Cache Store implementation, but I needed some more configuration points, especially the ttl.

That’s why I wrote my own Rails 3 Redis Cache, also a great way to get used to the way of working with Redis and the Redistogo addon.

Using Rails Redis Cache

There is some configuration needed for Rails to pick up the new cache store. If you want to use different or no caching for test, development and production, you should put the config in your environment files:

# config/environemnts/production.rb
config.action_controller.perform_caching = true
config.cache_store = ActiveSupport::Cache::RailsRedisCache.new(:url => ENV['REDISTOGO_URL'])

If there is a Redis server available in all environments, you can put it in your environment file:

# config/environment.rb
ActionController::Base.cache_store = ActiveSupport::Cache::RailsRedisCache.new(:url => ENV['REDISTOGO_URL'])

The caching parts are mostly in my controllers:

@tweets = cache("tweets", :expires_in => 30.seconds){ Twitter::Search.new(...) }

The store is using the basic Rails cache store implementation which is broken in the Rails 3.0.0.beta1 version that runs on Heroku, so I added a monkey-patch for that using edge Rails.

Redis on localhost

Installing and running Redis on Mac OS X is really simple:

brew install redis
redis-server

There is also a commandline client available for direct access:

redis-cli
redis> set "foo" "bar"
OK
redis> get "foo"
"bar"

It’s key value stores, stupid!

Mongo Ruby Driver, Mongoid and MongoMapper

================================================================= =================================================================

Update Aug. 2010

On Whyday, I created a live demo of the examples, that is running on Heroku.

=============================================================== ===============================================================

I am constantly looking around for different storage mechanisms on Heroku that can be used for caching 3rd party data. A recent update of their platform offered an MongoDB addon to access the MongoHQ service that drew my attention, so I started to evaluate this noSQL document database…

MongoDB on OS X

It’s always a good starting point to have a local installation of a technology, here is how you get it running on your Mac with Homebrew:

brew install mongodb
# create a place for MongoDB to store the data
mkdir -p /data/db
# run server with default config (adapt to the right version)
mongod run --config /usr/local/Cellar/mongodb/1.4.4-x86_64/mongod.conf

Using MongoHQ requires a user-authentication, so it’s nice to have the same credentials on your local MongoDB instance:

# start the client
mongo
> use test
> db.addUser("test", "test")

evaluating different APIs

A very basic approach, that basically wraps the MongoDB API into Ruby code is the Mongo Ruby Driver, but there are two higher level APIs close to ActiveRecord called Mongoid and MongoMapper.

Mongo Ruby Driver

It’s pretty easy to connect to your MongoDB with the right connection string:

conn = Mongo::Connection.from_uri("mongodb://user:[email protected]:port/db")
db = conn.db("db")

The Mongo Ruby Driver is very simple and close to the MongoDB API:

coll = db.collection('test')
coll.insert('a' => 1)
coll.find().each { |row| p row }

MongoMapper

MongoMapper can also be accessed with a connection string:

Mongo::Connection.from_uri(MONGO_URL)

Instead of using ActiveRecord::Base MongoMapper provides the MongoMapper::Document module to handle the object document mapping. Since the structure of a document in MongoDB is open and not static like in a SQL database, you have to define the structure in code, so MongoMapper knows how to map the document to your Ruby objects:

class Person
  include MongoMapper::Document

  key :name, String
  key :age, Integer
  key :born_at, Time
  key :active, Boolean
  key :fav_colors, Array

  connection Mongo::Connection.from_uri(MONGO_URL)
  set_database_name 'basement'
end

person = Person.create({
  :name => 'Nunemaker',
  :age => 27,
  :born_at => Time.mktime(1981, 11, 25, 2, 30),
  :active => true,
  :fav_colors => %w(red green blue)
})

person.save

Person.all.each do |p|
  ...
end

Mongoid

Configuring Mongoid is somewhat different but easy:

Mongoid.database = Mongo::Connection.new(host, port).db(db)
Mongoid.database.authenticate(user, pass)

The DSL for defining Mongoid Documents is similar to MongoMapper and works mostly the same way. Querying the database is also similar to the API provided by ActiveRecord:

class Tweeter 
  include Mongoid::Document 
  field :user 
  embeds_many :tweets 
end 

class Tweet 
  include Mongoid::Document 
  field :status, :type => String 

  embedded_in :tweeter, :inverse_of => :tweets 
end

tweet = Tweet.new(:status => "This is a tweet!") 
tweet.tweeter = Tweeter.new(:user => 'ted') 
tweet.save

Tweeter.all.each do |tweeter| 
  ...
end

You can get the complete code and some more links from the GitHub project created for testing.

MongoDB is a great way to store document focused data and it’s simple to use with these great libraries!

ASIN vs ruby-aaws

I recently wrote about using ruby-aaws on Heroku. I used it for creating a virtual bookshelf on my website, so anybody interested in what I read can have a look at the ISBN, price, description and some reviews (in german). Since this is a trivial scenario it covers only a fragment of features that ruby-aaws offers.

I always felt that using ruby-aaws was way too complicated! This is how you call Amazon for the title of a book:

require "amazon"
require "amazon/aws"
require "amazon/aws/search"
il = Amazon::AWS::ItemLookup.new('ASIN', { 'ItemId'=>asin })
rg = Amazon::AWS::ResponseGroup.new('Medium')
req = Amazon::AWS::Search::Request.new
resp = req.search(il, rg)
puts resp.item_lookup_response.items[0].item.item_attributes.title.to_s

I also had to monkeypatch some stuff to get it working with Heroku the first time:

  • allow .amazonrc to be on a different location that can be used on Heroku
  • remove restriction to Ruby 1.8.7 and patch related Stuff

If you look into the source and documentation of ruby-aaws you will see that it is no fun to patch anything in there… I think I would not have done it without the help of Ian Macdonald.

Another thing was, that I could not use the builtin caching facility of ruby-aaws, cause it simply does not work on Heroku’s readonly file-system.

simplicity with ASIN

Given these restrictions, I decided to build a minimum featureset gem tailored for my requirements:

  • provide access to the Amazon-E-Commerce-API via REST
  • simple configuration points
  • minimum amount of code to write for a request
  • maximum flexibility

If you have a look into the Amazon documentation you see that it is quite easy to call the API via REST. Just append some query parameters to your desired endpoint (f.e. webservices.amazon.com) and as a result you get the desired information from Amazon. The tricky thing is, that since recently you have to sign your request with your AWS credentials. I did not find any specs on how to do that on the documentation, but Cloud Carpenters had a nice example using Python that I adapted for Ruby.
There is also the nice Amazon API signing service that frees you from self signing your requests. The reason I did not use it, is that it supports the amazon.com endpoint only (I need amazon.de).

requests with ASIN

Using ASIN is simple. You just have to provide your credentials to the configuration method, the rest is covered with sensible defaults that you can override if you wish:

require 'asin'
include ASIN

# use the configure method to setup your api credentials
configure :secret => 'your-secret', :key => 'your-key'

# you can override the api endpoint if you wish
configure :secret => 'your-secret', :key => 'your-key', :host => 'webservices.amazon.de'

After this setup you can call the REST api via the lookup method:

# lookup an item with the amazon standard identification number (asin)
item = lookup '1430218150'

# have a look at the title of the item
item.title
=> Learn Objective-C on the Mac (Learn Series)

# provide additional configuration options like the response group
lookup(asin, :ResponseGroup => :Medium)

Title is currently the only attribute that is directly supported from the Item class, but this is no restriction. ASIN uses Hashie::Mash for the internal data representation of the Amazon REST XML response. The Item class stores the response in a raw attribute that can be accessed for read:

# access the internal data representation (Hashie::Mash)
item.raw.ItemAttributes.ListPrice.FormattedPrice
=> $39.99

You can tailor the Item class to your needs by opening up the class and provide the methods you like or doing something entirely different with the raw attribute.

OR, just fork me on GitHub!

Maximum flexibility with some syntactic sugar!