Installing CommunityEngine on Rails 2.1

October 26th, 2008

Installing CommunityEngine on Rails 2.1

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In a previous post, I talked about why we chose CommunityEngine. And due to the lack of documentation and several issues I had, I thought it would be useful to go through the installation steps and handling some issues.

Requirements

Required gems

Rails 2.1.0
rake 0.8.1
rmagick
hpricot
htmlentities
RedCloth
haml
aws-s3 (if using Amazon S3 for photos)

Notes for Windows users

hpricot:

gem install hpricot ––source http://code.whytheluckystiff.net

rmagick:

Download the latest version of rmagick-win32. At the time of writing, it is RMagick-2.6.0-ImageMagick-6.4.3-6-Q8.zip
Extract the zipped file and run the installer
Install the gem you downloaded:

gem install rmagick --local

Restart Windows

Installation

Create a new Rails app:

rails community -d mysql

Install the engines plugin:

ruby script/plugin install git://github.com/lazyatom/engines.git

Put the community engine plugin into plugins directory:

git clone --depth 1 git://github.com/bborn/communityengine.git vendor/plugins/community_engine

Create the databases:

rake db:create:all

Rename public/index.html to index_backup.html

Modify your environment.rb to look like the following:


RAILS_GEM_VERSION = '2.1.0' unless defined? RAILS_GEM_VERSION
require File.join(File.dirname(__FILE__), '../vendor/plugins/engines/boot')
Rails::Initializer.run do |config|

#resource_hacks required here to ensure routes like /:login_slug work
config.plugins = [:engines, :community_engine, :white_list, :all]
config.plugin_paths += ["#{RAILS_ROOT}/vendor/plugins/community_engine/engine_plugins"]
...
end
require "#{RAILS_ROOT}/vendor/plugins/community_engine/engine_config/boot.rb"

Modify all environment files ('development.rb', 'test.rb', and 'production.rb') by adding:

APP_URL = "http://localhost:3000"

Modify your routes.rb by adding this after any of your own existing routes, but before the default rails routes:

map.from_plugin :community_engine
map.connect ':controller/:action/:id'
map.connect ':controller/:action/:id.:format'

Generate the community engine migrations:

ruby script/generate plugin_migration

Migrate the database:

rake db:migrate

Run your tests:

rake test

Run CommunityEngine test:

rake community_engine:test

Start the server:

ruby script/server

Go to /signup to create a new user
To set a user as admin:

rake community_engine:make_admin email=user@foo.com

To activate the user, follow the activation link sent in the email (or appeared in the log after creating the user) or use this query:

update users set activated_at = current_date where id = 1

Enjoy!

Common Issues

On Windows, if the app run without any css and the console shows a warning: Couldn't create the public file structure for plugin 'community_engine', modify engines.rb,line 147 to be:

base_target_dir = File.join(destination, File.dirname(source_files.first).gsub!(source, ""))

If you get a warning: DEPRECATION WARNING: You're using the Ruby-based MySQL library that ships with Rails. This library will be REMOVED FROM RAILS 2.2, do this:

gem install mysql

Customization

Do NOT edit any file of CommunityEngine plugin so you can replace it when updates are available in the future
You can edit app/config/application.yml to override the default configuration defined in /vendor/plugins/community_engine/engine_config/application.yml
Any views you create in your app directory will override those in /vendor/plugins/community_engine/app/views
Creating an identically-named controller in your application's app/controllers directory, mixes your code with CommunityEngine's (your code takes precedence)
To mix models code, you must require the CommunityEngine's model first (check this). Otherwise, your model would completely replace CommunityEngine's. For example: app/models/country.rb
```
require_dependency "#{RAILS_ROOT}/vendor/plugins/community_engine/app/models/country.rb"

class Country  "name")
  end  
end
```
For more info, check the readme file of CommunityEngine: /vendor/plugins/community_engine/README.markdown