faye_shards

Provides some useful methods to push data from Ruby on Rails to Faye (by jcoglan, faye.jcoglan.com).
Designed to work with both HTTP and HTTPS connections (RoR pushes via HTTP, client can be connected using HTTPS). Check out rails-alex.blogspot.com/2011/10/ssl-support-for-high-loaded-faye-nodejs.html to see how to configure Stunnel in front of Faye to enable HTTPS.

Comments

This gem will be helpful if you are planning to run more than one instance of Faye (doesn’t matter on 1 server or on many). If users in your application are subscribed to unique channels (eg. “/#current_usercurrent_user.id”) - faye_shards will fit all your needs. If you have global channels (which you use widely) and many instances of Faye - this game is not a perfect solution for you, but it will work. It doesn’t matter if you use Redis as data storage or not.

Check out these posts/discussions about Faye sharding:

Installing

Simply add

gem 'faye_shards'

to your Gemfile

Configuration

All you need to configure gem is to create file faye.yml in config folder. Here is an example:

development:
  shards:
    -
      port: 42000
      host: 127.0.0.1
    -
      port: 42001
      host: 127.0.0.1
production:
  shards:
    -
      local_host: 10.1.1.1
      port: 42000
      host: server1.myapp.com
      secured: true
      secured_port: 32000
    -
      local_host: 10.1.1.1
      port: 42001
      host: server1.myapp.com
      secured: true
      secured_port: 32001

Required options:

host - IP or domain name where instance of Faye is running
port - port, instance of Faye is listening to

Optional params:

local_host - local IP of server. Used for pushes from Rails instead of host if specified. Just to communicate via local interfaces.
secured - true/false. Specifies if there is a SSL Offloading configured for Faye instance.
secured_port - Required if secured is set to true.

So, in my example for production I have 2 Faye instances listening to ports 42000 and 42001 using HTTP + Stunnel configured to listen 32000 and 32001.

Usage

URL for Faye’s client-side JS (unless you store it somewhere on diff storage) is returned by this methos:

current_user.faye_shard.js_url(request.ssl?)

Module FayeShard::User::Faye which can be included to your User model provides method faye_channel which returns unique channel id for user. If you do not want to include module to your model - you need to manage unique channels for users yourself.

On client side, subscription should look like:

client = new Faye.Client(<%= raw current_user.faye_shard.url(request.ssl?).inspect %>);
fayeSubscription = client.subscribe(<%= raw current_user.faye_channel.inspect %>, function(data) {});

fayeSubscription = client.subscribe(<%= raw my_own_method_for_channel_id.inspect %>, function(data) {});

Pushing data to user’s channel also depends on your decision to include module FayeShard::User::Faye. So, 2 options:

current_user.push_to_faye(data) # Sends data to channel, returned by current_user.faye_channel

FayeShards.shard(current_user.id).push(my_own_method_for_channel_id, data)

Extensions can be passed as an additional hash after data

How to push to global channel and more information about gem can be found here: .

Roadmap / TODO