not_found and error handlers for custom 404 and 500 responses

Sinatra provides a helpful pair of special handlers for 404 and 500 errors. By default, Sinatra has an ugly “Not Found” and “Error” message, these allow you to customize them, and render your own pages.

It’s pretty simple:

# Render views/404.haml
not_found do
  haml :'404'
end
 
# Render views/500.haml
# @e holds whatever was thrown, in this example, a string, 
# but it could have an Error class of some sort.
error do
  @e = request.env['sinatra_error']
  haml :'500'
end
 
get '/' do
  raise "Error happened!"
end

Notice that I had to surround the templates in single quotes. This is because ruby syntax doesn’t let symbol’s first character be a number. By quoting it, it gets around that issue.

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Sinatra 0.3 Features

Ryan Tomayko provided a great changelist for the new gem release of Sinatra, which I hope to expand on a bit here, by pointing you to more details on the changes.

Here’s a quick summary of changes since the 0.2.2 release:

• Add sinatra.gemspec w/ support for github gem builds. Forks can now
  enable the build gem option in github to get free username-sinatra.gem
  builds: gem install username-sinatra.gem — source=http://gems.github.com/
• Require Rack 0.4; removes frozen rack dir.
• Basic RSpec support; require ‘sinatra/test/rspec’ instead of
  ‘sinatra/test/spec’ to use. [avdi]
• before filters can modify request environment vars used for
  routing (e.g., PATH_INFO, REQUEST_METHOD, etc.) for URL rewriting
  type functionality.
• In-file templates now uses @@ instead of ## as template separator.
• Top-level environment test predicates: development?, test?, production?
• Top-level “set”, “enable”, and “disable” methods for tweaking
  app options. [rtomayko] — This allows the syntax in my post about options
• Top-level “use” method for building Rack middleware pipelines
  leading to app. see readme for usage. [rtomayko] — this is the use syntax in my post about sessions
• New “reload” option - set false to disable reloading in development.
• New “host” option - host/ip to bind to [cschneid]
• New “app_file” option - override the file to reload in development
  mode [cschneid] — This makes embedding Sinatra inside other apps easier to do during development. More info in my app_file post.
• Development error/not_found page cleanup [sr, adamwiggins]
• Remove a bunch of core extensions (String#to_param, String#from_param,
  Hash#from_params, Hash#to_params, Hash#symbolize_keys, Hash#pass)
• Various grammar and formatting fixes to README; additions on
  community and contributing [cypher]
• Build RDoc using Hanna template: http://sinatra.rubyforge.org/api/
• Specs, documentation and fixes for splat’n routes [vic] — See how to use splat routes in my post on it.
• Fix whitespace errors across all source files. [rtomayko]
• Fix streaming issues with Mongrel (body not closed). [bmizerany]
• Fix various issues with environment not being set properly (configure
  blocks not running, error pages not registering, etc.) [cypher]
• Fix to allow locals to be passed to ERB templates [cschneid] — More Details
• Fix locking issues causing random errors during reload in development.
• Fix for escaped paths not resolving static files [Matthew Walker]

Posted in Programming, Ruby, Sinatra | No Comments »

Sinatra Gem 0.3!

Well, Ryan Tomayko has taken up the reins for a gem release from the every busy Blake, and rolled out a new Sinatra gem.

You need to upgrade to this one. All sorts of bug fixes, new features, and just general polish.

I’ll come back in a day or two to write a nice long post will a rundown of the features. The nice thing is that most of what I’ve been writing about in the past has been against edge Sinatra. Since gem equals edge right now, everything I’ve written should apply to everybody (without all the work of running the github version). So go upgrade!

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