Eruby

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Eruby is a way to embed ruby in HTML.

Contents

Setup

First, obtain a copy of eruby. This is most easily done by using SSH and simply copying /usr/bin/eruby. Name the file eruby.cgi and stick it in the root of the site you'd like to enable ruby on. 

 cp /usr/bin/eruby ~/mysite.com/eruby.cgi

Next, create or edit an .htaccess file. There are two important things to do: make sure .rhtml files get parsed by eruby and make sure apache knows to look for an index.rhtml. 

 DirectoryIndex index.rhtml index.html index.htm
 AddHandler rubypage .rhtml
 Action rubypage /eruby.cgi

Testing

You can use the following simple test to make sure everything is working. 

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd">
<html>
 <head>
  <title>Eruby!</title>
 </head>
 <body>
  <h1>A Test of Eruby</h1>
  <em>The current time should be printed below.</em>
  <p><% print Time.now %></p>
 </body>
</html>

Encoding issues

Note that the compiled in default charset of the eruby program is the iso-8859-1 charset. The charset header produced by eruby is independent of the content of the page served. All pages served by the eruby filter must be of the same charset, preferably UTF-8, or mismatched charset headers will be produced. The compiled in program default will very likely be changed to UTF-8 in a future version of the program but at the time of this writing is still iso-8859-1.

There are two solutions.

  • Compile eruby with the configure.rb --with-charset=UTF-8 option to change the default charset.
  • Override the default charset with the eruby -C UTF-8 command line option.

It is probably easiest is to override the default character set with the command line option. It avoids needing to use a customized eruby program. It is self-documenting as to the behavior. Instead of copying the eruby program binary as described above to eruby.cgi create a shell script wrapper eruby.cgi that calls the eruby binary with the -C UTF-8 option. 

 #!/bin/sh
 cd $(dirname ${PATH_TRANSLATED:-/})
 exec /usr/local/bin/eruby -C UTF-8 "$@"

This has two advantages. One is that the eruby binary is in the expected system location and can be updated there normally when other system upgrades occur. This example illustrated a location in /usr/local/bin/eruby which is typical for locally compiled and installed programs but your site may use /usr/bin/eruby. Use the appropriate path there. A second advantage is that the working directory in this script is changed to the page directory making this compatible with mod_ruby behavior.

See Also

External Links

Retrieved from "http://wiki.dreamhost.com/Eruby"
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