Question

This is a little out of the ordinary for a normal Ruby/Rails application. I am building an application that mostly runs on top of Event Machine. There are a few HTML files that are served up from WEBrick, but the majority of the application runs client-side with javascript, with a Web Socket connection to my Event Machine application. I need to be able to accept file uploads and store them locally. How can this be done?

Update: If you’re interested, here is a link to the source code.

Answer 1

First here is how to build a simple file upload with sinatra: File upload with Sinatra

So now to run your web server with thin you can do this in your code:

class MyWebApp < Sinatra::Base
  # here goes the sinatra app code
  post '/something' do
    # ...
  end
end

EM::run do
  Thin::Server.start('0.0.0.0', 8000) do
    map('/'){ run MyWebApp.new }
  end
end

thin uses eventmachine internally, I suppose webrick uses threads but honestly I never really looked into it.

You should use apache or nginx in front of your ruby process at least for the file upload (I think websockets won’t work through it).
I can include a simple nginx config if you need (just need to find it on my disk xD).

Edit: Another solution is to use goliath as web server, you have an example here: https://github.com/postrank-labs/goliath/blob/master/examples/async_upload.rb
If you don’t need to display upload progress you should stay with sinatra+nginx/apache.