Checking for Functional Site

rubyonrails-talk
1

I have my rails sites hosted by Bluehost. While they are in many ways an ideal host for developers, they have one very major problem.

Their sysadmins periodically change the Rails installation without any warning to users. The result of this is that the sites periodically break - and we get no warning that this is going to happen. I don't fault them for updating the installation - rails is pretty new technology after all. By not letting us know what's happening, however, our sites can go down without warning. The only way to determine whether or not they've done something is to actually connect to the site and see whether or not it is still working. I've complained to them about this repeatedly ... their normal response is simply to ignore the complaint.

Is there some way to do an autocheck of the system to see if anything in the rails installation / configuration has changed? If there is, I could set this up as a cron job and do a manual check when I determined that something had changed. This would also minimize the distortion of the logs from the hits from my check.

Thanks in advance ---Michael

2

Hi, why not take an easier approach by freezing a version of rails as
well as your gems before you deploy your application.

Good luck,

-Conrad

3

If you can run a cron script, don't worry about actually doing something in Ruby or Rails itself. Just write a bash script to check the output of the 'gem rails' command for the appropriate version number you use.

4

Hi Michael,

Freezing your Rails gems is probably the best way to maintain control over the version of the framework being used and is highly recommended in a shared environment. You might also consider using some free externally hosted service (i.e. Pingdom, mon.itor.us, etc.) for checking the status of the website from the end-user perspective in order to keep tabs on your site from the end-user perspective. Ultimately though, I don't know if I'd be so forgiving about a hosting company that doesn't want to communicate with their customers. :frowning:

5

Sounds like you need a new hosting location!! Your statement about Rails is a new and that makes it ok to F with your customers? I would demand my money back if thats how they do business..

6

cron wget to run every minute pulling HEAD requests and email you if there's a 404 or 500 or whatever you get when it's busted.

-eric

7

Eric wrote:

cron wget to run every minute pulling HEAD requests and email you if there's a 404 or 500 or whatever you get when it's busted.

-eric

You will quickly get your inbox overflooded in such case. Using a remote service like HopToad or GetExceptional is better. If anyone knows about an ever better option, please let use know.