This got me wondering: “does Ruby have finalizers?”. It turns out it does in the form of ObjectSpace#define_finalizer. It’s worth mentioning that there are some tricks to using them which are nicely documented on Mike Perham’s blog here.

The gist of it is this: don’t create finalizers which hold a reference to the instance they’re finalizing or it just won’t work. I’m glad I found that blog post before I started coding because I would have certainly fallen into the trap he describes. It probably doesn’t help that the ruby doc examples don’t include any examples of adding a finalizer in a class definition.

So all of this works out pretty nicely and leaves me with code looking something like this:

Jason’s instructions tell us to install the “hanna” template via gem install mislav-hanna which is out of date, so we will use the most current instructions from the gems github page to install the template. No big deal, just drop the github username from the gem install command like this…

The “hanna” template absolutely kills the default rdoc template. You’ve probably seen it around being used by various projects and there’s no reason not to use it locally.

Next I updated my .gemrc to ignore ri and to use the “hanna” template for rdocs.

Finally I re-generated my rdocs by running:

I ignored the rest of the steps in the aforementioned post as I don’t really feel the need to be running a passenger instance just to serve rubygems docs. I generally just run gem server whenever I need to access my local docs.

My solution is barely more than what you get out of the box with rubygems but with just a few changes I find myself much happier with my local docs.

1. You want to deploy a Sinatra application with Passenger on Dreamhost
2. You’re using a Dreamhost shared hosting account
3. You’re application relies on gems that aren’t installed globally on Dreamhost
4. You’ve got the gems you need installed locally like this

Then you’ll want to include something like this in your rackup file:

This will make sure your locally installed gems will be available to your application. Maybe my google skills are getting rusty, but it took me a while to find this solution. Here’s the original source.

Assumptions… 1) The scripts working directory is the directory you have all your movie files in. 2) You’ve added the .dvdmedia extension to folders containing the ‘VIDEO_TS’ folder.

It wouldn’t be hard to make this a little more user friendly and not dependent on the .dvdmedia file extension, but I already had manually added it on all those folders to make them play nice with OS X.

Update: I moved to HostingRails.com and things are much better. Only gripe is the slight delay when going to the app for the first time which is a result of mod_rails spinning up.