Pull in Viget posts

content/elsewhere/rubyinline-in-shared-rails-environments/index.md

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+---
+title: "RubyInline in Shared Rails Environments"
+date: 2008-05-23T00:00:00+00:00
+draft: false
+needs_review: true
+canonical_url: https://www.viget.com/articles/rubyinline-in-shared-rails-environments/
+---
+
+As an end-to-end web production company, we have a vested interest in
+making Rails applications easier to deploy for both development and
+production purposes. We've developed
+[Tyrant](http://trac.extendviget.com/tyrant/wiki), a Rails app for
+running Rails apps, and we're [eagerly
+watching](https://www.viget.com/extend/passenger-let-it-ride/) as new
+solutions are created and refined.
+
+But it's a new market, and current solutions are not without their share
+of obstacles. In working with both Tyrant and [Phusion
+Passenger](http://www.modrails.com/), we've encountered difficulties
+running applications that use
+[RubyInline](http://www.zenspider.com/ZSS/Products/RubyInline/) to embed
+C into Ruby code (e.g.,
+[ImageScience](http://seattlerb.rubyforge.org/image_science/classes/ImageScience.html),
+my image processing library of choice). Try to start up an app that uses
+RubyInline code in a shared environment, and you might encounter the
+following error:
+
+     /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/RubyInline-3.6.7/lib/inline.rb:325:in `mkdir': Permission denied - /home/users/www-data/.ruby_inline (Errno::EACCES)
+
+RubyInline uses the home directory of the user who started the server to
+compile the inline code; problems occur when the current process is
+owned by a different user. "Simple," you think. "I'll just open that
+directory up to everybody." Not so fast, hotshot. Try to start the app
+again, and you get the following:
+
+     /home/users/www-data/.ruby_inline is insecure (40777). It may not be group or world writable. Exiting.
+
+Curses! Fortunately, VigetExtend is here to help. Drop this into your
+environment-specific config file:
+
+``` {#code .ruby}
+ temp = Tempfile.new('ruby_inline', '/tmp') dir = temp.path temp.delete Dir.mkdir(dir, 0755) ENV['INLINEDIR'] = dir 
+```
+
+We use the [Tempfile](http://ruby-doc.org/core/classes/Tempfile.html)
+library to generate a guaranteed-unique filename in the `/tmp`
+directory, prepended with "ruby_inline." After storing the filename, we
+delete the tempfile and create a directory with the proper permissions
+in its place. We then store the directory path in the `INLINEDIR`
+environment variable, so that RubyInline knows to use it to compile.