October 02, 2008

Programming for fun?

I’ve been working on the cookbook application for the wife and couple interesting things.

I use Dreamhost, and while they rock in alot of ways they won’t let me have any long running processes. I wanted to add full text search to my cookbook (because if you can’t find the recipe you want, what good is a cookbook) and I couldn’t use the likes of Sphinx or Ferret. But if I changed my DB to MySQL (which dreamhost does provide) I can use the built in fulltext search. It is a little hackish, and MySQL specific but it works and is plenty fast for my needs.

I had to do two things:

1) Add a FULLTEXT index to my migration

  def self.up
    ...
    execute 'ALTER TABLE recipes ENGINE = MyISAM'
    execute 'CREATE FULLTEXT INDEX ft_idx_recipes ON recipes(title,ingredients,directions)'
  end

  def self.down
    execute 'ALTER TABLE recipes DROP INDEX ft_idx_recipes'
    execute 'ALTER TABLE recipes ENGINE = InnoDB'
    drop_table :recipes
  end

2) In my recipes controller in the search action I have the following line

 @recipes = Recipe.find_by_sql("SELECT \* FROM recipes WHERE MATCH (title, ingredients, directions) AGAINST ('#{query.gsub(/'/, "''")}');")

The gsub bit is to sanitize the sql. Pretty simple really, and if I ever want to replace it all I need to do is modify the controller.

I found out today that the Bort guys added OpenID support to the project. Which would normally involve some obscure svn/patch hijinks to deal with, but thanks to git I can just grab their changes (I did fork my project from theirs to start with).

 git branch openid # incase I screw things up
 git checkout openid # use the new branch
 git pull git://github.com/fudgestudios/bort.git master
 # Fix any conflicts and merge back to master

Finally, did everyone know you can put alias in the .gitconfig file? Well, you never told me.

 [alias]
   co = checkout
   ci = commit
   st = status


🚀