Gotcha: composite_primary_keys gem

Dr. Nic's composite_primary_keys gem is incredibly helpful if you're writing rails code against a legacy database, or in any other situation where you can't or won't follow the rails convention of having a single field as your model's primary key.
After doing the usual;

sudo gem install composite_primary_keys

...and requiring it in you environment.rb file, you can define a model like this;

class Membership < ActiveRecord::Base
set_primary_keys :user_id, :group_id
...
end

Brilliant.
But, there is one subtlety you need to be aware of. If your model mixes in any modules, you might end up writing something like this;

class Membership < ActiveRecord::Base
include MyAwesomeModule
set_primary_keys :user_id, :group_id
...
end

Looks fine, doesn't it? Unfortunately, your tests will now break with lots of errors like this;

ActiveRecord::StatementInvalid in 'Membership should foobar'
Mysql::Error: Column count doesn't match value count at row 1: INSERT INTO memberships (`user_id`, `group_id`, ... , id) VALUES (...whatever...)
/Users/david/myproj/vendor/composite_primary_keys-0.9.90/lib/composite_primary_keys/base.rb:106:in `create_without_callbacks'

See that last id, just before VALUES? It shouldn't be there. Something weird is going on, because composite_primary_keys doesn't seem to be doing its thing.
The solution is to make sure the call to "set_primary_keys" is the first thing executed in your model;

class Membership < ActiveRecord::Base
set_primary_keys :user_id, :group_id
include MyAwesomeModule
...
end

Remember this, and everything works fine. Forget it, and you'll have lots of fun with the debugger.
If I were braver, smarter and kinder, I would dive headfirst into the code and try to fix it. But, I've got work to do.

Testing file uploads with RSpec on Rails

I was writing specs for a controller that processes uploaded images, and came up with this way of mocking a file upload control. So, I thought I'd share it.
Say you have a WibbleController which can replace the image belonging to a particular wibble. In your wibble/edit view you probably have something like this;

<% form_for(@wibble, :html => { :multipart => true }) do |f| %>
...
Replace with new image:
<%= f.file_field :new_file %>
...
<% end -%>

In your controller, there will be something that reads the streamed file data that the browser posts when you choose and submit a file.
In your spec, you can create an ActionController::UploadedStringIO object (which is what your controller will see), but it won't have access to the file data. So, we need to monkey patch it a bit.
The two methods we need to override are "read", which will return the file contents, and "size" (guess what that does). So, define a method in your spec file like so;

def mock_uploader(file, type = 'image/png')
filename = "%s/%s" % [ File.dirname(__FILE__), file ]
uploader = ActionController::UploadedStringIO.new
uploader.original_path = filename
uploader.content_type = type
def uploader.read
  File.read(original_path)
end
def uploader.size
  File.stat(original_path).size
end
uploader
end

Then, you could write a spec like this ('foo.png' should be a suitable image file in your spec/controllers directory);

it "should upload an image" do
 Image.delete_all
 uploader = mock_uploader 'foo.png'
 post :update, {
   :id => @object.id,
   :wibble => { :image_file => uploader }
 }
 response.should be_success
 Image.count.should == 1
 i = Image.find(:first)
 i.filename.should == uploader.original_path
 i.contents.length.should == uploader.size
end

There may well be a better way to do this, in which case please let me know via the comments.

Auto-rotate Rails log files

I've been searching for a way to make my rails apps rotate their log files automatically, the way apache does it. In my case, I get logs like this;

• access_log.20080407
• error_log.20080407

i.e. a log file per day, with the date as the suffix of the filename.
When a new day rolls around, a new file is started. Simple.
Hunting around on the web, most people seem to be writing a /etc/logrotate.conf file to achieve something like this. This has a couple of problems;

• After switching to a new log file, all your mongrel/fastcgi processes need to be restarted. Otherwise, you get a segfault when they try to log to a file that's not there anymore.
• The /etc/logrotate.conf file is yet another file whose deployment needs to be managed (potentially along with a cron entry to kick off logrotate at the appropriate time).

So, I kept digging and eventually found this post
So, Rails can be told to log to a pipe, just like apache. I'm not familiar with cronolog, so this is what I ended up putting in my config/environments/production.rb file;

config.active_record.colorize_logging = false

log_pipe = IO.popen("/usr/sbin/rotatelogs #{RAILS_ROOT}/log/production_log.%Y%m%d 86400", 'a')

config.logger = Logger.new(log_pipe)

[the second entry is supposed to be a single line from 'log_pipe = ' to ')' ]

1. Turn off colorized logs, because they irritate me.
2. Open a pipe to rotatelogs (I use 'a' for 'append', instead of 'w' for 'write', but it doesn't seem to make any difference on my system - the file is appended to when I restart rails, whichever I choose).
3. Point the rails logger to the pipe.

This seems to do exactly what I want, with minimal mucking about.