Gzip compression of .rb and .rhtml files.

rubyonrails-talk
1

I haven't been able to find the answer to my question by Googling, possibly because "gzip" is everywhere on the web.

The context of my question is: deploying a Ruby on Rails application onto a system with limited (flash) storage. I am aware of the various compressed filesystems available, but I'm considering other approaches.

Is it possible to deploy a Rails application with all/some of it's source .rb, .rhtml, .css and .js files gzipped to save space?

e.g. If foo.rb can't be found, foo.rb.gz should be read instead. So long as the .rb and .rhtml files do need to be accessed randomly, there should be no need to gunzip the file in place.

These are text files, so 3:1 compression may be possible.

I have a feeling (as functions are first class objects in Ruby) that it may be possible to redefine a few IO functions to achieve this. Any hints would be welcome.

Regards,

Chris.

2

Chris Dew wrote: > I haven't been able to find the answer to my question by Googling, > possibly because "gzip" is everywhere on the web.

> The context of my question is: deploying a Ruby on Rails application > onto a system with limited (flash) storage. I am aware of the various > compressed filesystems available, but I'm considering other > approaches.

> Is it possible to deploy a Rails application with all/some of it's > source .rb, .rhtml, .css and .js files gzipped to save space?

Try looking at changing methods

def read_template_file(template_path, extension)

or

  def render_template(template_extension, template, file_path = nil, local_assigns = {}) #:nodoc:

in

actionpack/lib/action_view/base.rb

> e.g. If foo.rb can't be found, foo.rb.gz should be read instead. So > long as the .rb and .rhtml files do need to be accessed randomly, > there should be no need to gunzip the file in place.

You lost me with that one.

If you just read a short file into memory, you can just gunzip the contents as you read them, not changing anything on disk.

If you need random access (read or write), you would need to gunzip the file to temporary storage (perhaps the disk), perform the operations, then gzip the file up again when finished.

I'm looking at ActionPack version 1.12.5 here. You may have a different version.

Maybe it's a one-liner.

Stephan

-- Posted viahttp://www.ruby-forum.com/.

Thanks for your reply,

Chris.

3

I think you’ll find the Output Compression plugin [http://wiki.rubyonrails.org/rails/pages/Output+Compression+Plugin] does what you’re looking for. I was playing around with it and looking at the results in Firebug and it looked good.

RSL

4

If you want output compression for serving files, you can just use Apache’s deflate module:

Deflate

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html text/plain text/css text/javascript

… text/xml application/xml application/xhtml+xml text/javascript

BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4 gzip-only-text/html

BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4.0[678] no-gzip

BrowserMatch \bMSIE !no-gzip !gzip-only-text/html

However, the original poster was looking for a way to compress his files on the server itself, decompressing them in memory before sending it through the ruby interpreter.

Best regards

Peter De Berdt

5

My impression is that the original poster is trying to host a Rails application on a very small shared hosting account (or a free hosting account). The total size of a fairly large Rails project rapidly exceeds 50 MB. My advise if this is indeed the case would be to just pay a little bit more for a decent hosting provider instead of trying to solve a problem that in the end will cost you more (timewise) then it will cost you to get a better hosting account.

Best regards

Peter De Berdt