RubyRef — easy access to Ruby documentation
I don’t know about you, but I can’t really remember the last time I added a bookmark to my browser (at least not on purpose, -D is right next to -F after all). So when I saw rustref.com, I knew I wanted to build something like this for the Ruby community, which is now available as rubyref.net.
tl;dr
RubyRef defines a list of CNAME records of the form *.rubyref.net which redirect to different Ruby related documentation sites. For example ruby.rubyref.net brings you to the core documentation, whereas api.ruby.net redirects to the C API documentation and awesome.rubyref.net will take you to the awesome-ruby repository on GitHub.
Architecture
Update: It’s now a static site generated with Middleman and hosted on Netlify, but the CloudFlare page rules are still used, as is the Rake task.
Manually defining a bunch of CNAMEs is not what I call a fun afternoon activity, but writing code is. So RubyRef uses a Roda app ) in combination with Cloudflare page rules to achieve its goal. Let’s have a look at the app first (current code / roda branch):
This reads a list of redirects from a file called redirects.json, where the various CNAMEs are mapped to their respective target URLs. The actual redirects happen through requests of the form GET https://rubyref.net/redirect/<CNAME> and the code necessary to achieve this couldn’t be any simpler.
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However, in the interest of less typing and faster autocompletes the redirects should be of the form https://<CNAME>.rubyref.net and to achieve that the following Cloudflare page rule is used:
So far so good, there’s however one last problem: Cloudflare does not offer proxying for wildcard CNAMEs in their free tier, so I wrote a little Rake task using the Cloudflare gem to automatically add “dummy” CNAMEs pointing to “rubyref.net” via the Cloudflare API:
With all the CNAMEs defined the page rule now works and the Roda app takes care of the rest 🎉
Contributing
If you want to see new sites added to RubyRef, just open a PR with the extra lines added to redirects.json and I will take care of the rest.
