1. Purchase a wildcard SSL certificate. I used RapidSSL, and while any will work, Comodo seems to be the one currently recommended by DNSimple, which we’ll use later in these instructions.
2. Next, add the SSL Endpoint add-on to your app via Heroku. It’s an additional $20 a month to enable this service, that’s just the cost-of-doin-bidness with Heroku.
3. So, at this point, you have your wildcard SSL installed with Heroku. You can tell if you installed it correctly by dropping into the Heroku CLI (which you can install via the Heroku Toolbelt) and issuing a “heroku certs”. This should give you an endpoint, which looks something like:

   waterfall-9359.herokussl.com

   You’ll need your specific endpoint for our next step, so copy it and keep it ready.

4. Finally, create an account with someone like DNSimple. Without an ALIAS service like this, you won’t be able to enable SSL on your root domain (like myapp.com or www.myapp.com). If you used DNSimple, go to the Advanced Editor for your domain. You’ll want to add the following:

   - an ALIAS record for your root url, myapp.com, which points to your Heroku-issued endpoint, like: waterfall-9359.herokussl.com
   - a CNAME record for your www-based url, www.myapp.com, which points to the same endpoint above, like waterfall-9359.herokussl.com
   - CNAME records for each subdoman you wish to enable SSL on, like blog.myapp.com or account.myapp.com, each pointing to our Heroku endpoint

5.  That should do it! The next step would be enabling SSL in your app, which is a straightforward process achieved by adding config.force_ssl = true to your application.rb file. (For more details on how to enable it in production only, read this excellent blog post from Simone Carletti.)

In this example I have a model, @tweets, filled with scraped tweets from Twitter. I have a hash, stats, filled with stats about those tweets–like the total number, the number of tweeters, the number of re-tweets, etc. Ideally, I’d like my JSON response to look something like:

{"stats":{"total":1024,"users":128,"retweets":"32"},"tweets":[{"tweet":"Petrol heads! Tune in to @DiscoveryUK at 9PM for the premiere of brand new #WheelerDealers the series kicks off with a rather nice Fiat Dino"},{"tweet":"2nd last nite in bahamas!  Dinner alone. shark diving done and my camera gear just arrived!!  Thanks a lot Air Canada. Exmas tmrw.  L"}...]}

First, in your controller, convert this hash to an OpenStruct format, which uses a RABL-friendly dot notation, like

your_controller.rb

require 'ostruct'
@stats = OpenStruct.new
@stats.total = @tweets.count
@stats.users = '128'  # Keep adding stats if you'd like
@stats.retweets = '32' # .. more stats

Then, in your view file
your_view_file.rabl

object false
 
child @stats => :stats do
    attribute :total, :users, :reteweets
end
 
child @tweets => :tweets do
    attributes :tweet
end

Your result should look like the example output above. Two things to note: 1) I was able to get this to work without explicitly requiring ostruct in my controller. 2) It also works without explicitly specifying "object false" in your .rabl file.

group :production do
gem 'execjs'
gem 'mysql'
end

And, you can–but not in the way I thought. What I thought was that if my environment was set to something other than “production,” then those Gems wouldn’t load. But that’s not the case without a little extra coaxing from bundler.

To ignore those gems, when I bundle, I need to add the switch --without production, like

bundle install --without production

Obviously you’d want to change production to whatever group you wanted bundler to skip. Doing this stores a flag in your APP_ROOT/.bundle/config file, and then subsequent bundles won’t include gems within the production group. That’s how you get groupings of Gems to be ignored in your Gemfile. To read more, check out http://gembundler.com/rationale.html.

name = "-"
unless User.name.nil?
  name = User.name
end

You can do it all in one quick line using Rails’ rescue bailout

name = User.name rescue "-"

or, even better (thanks @buckdoyle)

name = User.name || "-"

rails install –no-ri –no-rdoc

export ARCHFLAGS="-arch i386 -arch x86_64" ; gem install --no-rdoc --no-ri mysql -- --with-mysql-dir=/usr/local --with-mysql-config=/usr/local/mysql/bin/mysql_config