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Running Blacklight under JRuby

Published 2009-11-18 by Bill Dueber

I decided to see if I could get Blacklight working under JRuby, starting with running the test suite and working my way up from there.

There was much pain. Much, much pain. Exacerbated by my almost complete lack of knowledge about what I was doing.

This is the procedure I eventually arrived at — if there are places where I made trouble for myself, please let me know!

[And does anyone know how to get jruby’s nokogiri to link to a different libxml and stop with the crappy libxml2-version error message every time I run it under OSX???]

Download jruby

Go to jruby.org and download a binary distribution. Extract the tar.gz (or zip or whatever)

I’ll put mine in ~/jruby. Or, at least that’s what I’ll tell you.

tar xzf jruby-1.4.tar.gz

To avoid confusion, let’s make jrake an alias for rake and add the jruby bin directory to the path

cd ~/jruby/bin ln -s rake jrake export PATH=`pwd`:$PATH

Download Blacklight

git clone git://github.com/projectblacklight/blacklight.git

Again, well say that I put this in ~/blacklight/

Muck with Blacklight dependencies

Edit the file init.rb to comment out references to libxml and ruby-xslt, as well as nokogiri. My understanding is that the first two are used, at this point, only for the EAD stuff. Both rely on libxml2 which is a C-extension and hence unavailable to JRuby.

Nokogiri gets pulled in during other installs and for some reason jrake will complain later on that it’s got a wrong version or something. So, we’ll just work without that particular net for now.

#### File ~/blacklight/init.rb # config.gem 'libxml-ruby', :lib=>'libxml', :version=>'1.1.3' # config.gem 'ruby-xslt', :lib=>'xml/xslt', :version=>'0.9.6' # config.gem 'nokogiri', :version=>'1.3.3'

Do some initial installs

jgem install -v=2.3.4 rails jgem install activerecord-jdbc-adapter jdbc-sqlite3              activerecord-jdbcsqlite3-adapter ActiveRecord-JDBC jgem install rcov -s http://gemcutter.org --no-rdoc --no-ri jrake jrake gems:install

Edit the config/database.yml file

…to change the adapter to jdbcsqlite3 for development and testing.

Edit the databases.rake file

This one was harder to track down. The default rake task has hard-coded database names in the .rake file — jdbcsqlite3 isn’t included. I keep seeing things saying, “Oh, yeah, that’s been fixed…” but, well, it wasn’t for me. I had to do it by hand.

edit ~/jruby/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/rails-2.3.4/lib/tasks/databases.rake

You need to find everywhere there’s a

when "sqlite", "sqlite3" # or when /^sqlite/ in one case

…and change it to

when "sqlite", "sqlite3", "jdbcsqlite3"

Repeat for other databases you want to use (e.g., mysql). For the moment, since I’m only worried about running jrake spec, that’s all I’m gonna do.

Try again

jrake   Missing these required gems:    mislav-hanna  = 0.1.11

OK. Not sure why that didn’t come in before. Go head and add it.

jgem install  mislav-hanna

Migrate the databases

jrake

The databases should migrate, and then it’ll poop out because Solr didn’t start.

Fire up solr

Since we’re running jruby, accessing the shell doesn’t work. You’ll have to fire up your test solr instance by hand.

cd ~/blacklight/jetty java -Djetty.port=8888 -jar start.jar 2>log.jetty

Try it again!

cd ~/blacklight jrake spec     ................................................................    ................................................................    ....F............................................................    1)    'ApplicationHelper Export EndNote should render the correct    EndNote text file' FAILED    expected: "%0 Format\n%E Greer, Lowell. \n%E Lubin, Steven. \n%E Chase, Stephanie, \n%E Brahms, Johannes, \n%E Beethoven, Ludwig van, \n%E Krufft, Nikolaus von, \n%T Music for horn \n%I Harmonia Mundi USA, \n%C [United States] : \n%D p2001. \n",   got: "%0 Format\n%C [United States] : \n%D p2001. \n%E Greer, Lowell. \n%E Lubin, Steven. \n%E Chase, Stephanie, \n%E Brahms, Johannes, \n%E Beethoven, Ludwig van, \n%E Krufft, Nikolaus von, \n%I Harmonia Mundi USA, \n%T Music for horn \n" (using ##) ./spec/helpers/application_helper_spec.rb:128:  Finished in 15.519 seconds 193 examples, 1 failure

I can live with that for the moment. Anyone know why that spec fails?

Great! How about the features?

jrake features   (much output)    59 scenarios (59 passed)   434 steps (434 passed)   0m51.186s

And so…

…it appears that, at least on the surface, jruby is a viable platform for Blacklight so long as I don’t actually need any of the libxml stuff. In the next couple days I’ll try and actually get it all up and running and see if I can break it.