In Part 1 of "SFTP virtual users with ProFTPD and Rails", I introduced ProFTPD's virtual users and presented my annotated proftpd.conf that I used to integrate virtual users with a Rails application. Here in Part 2, I'll show how we generate virtual user credentials, how we display them to the user, as well as our SftpUser ActiveRecord model that does the heavy lifting.

Let's start at the top with the SFTP credentials UI. Our app's main workflow actually has users doing most of their uploads through a sweet Plupload widget. So, by default, the SFTP functionality is hidden behind a simple button sitting to the right of the Plupload widget:

The user can click that button to open the SFTP UI, or the Plupload …

I recently worked on a Rails 3.2 project that used the sweet PLupload JavaScript/Flash upload tool to upload files to the web app. To make it easier for users to upload large and/or remote files to the app, we also wanted to let them upload via SFTP. The catch was, our users didn't have SFTP accounts on our server and we didn't want to get into the business of creating and managing SFTP accounts. Enter: ProFTPD and virtual users.

ProFTPD's virtual users concept allows you to point ProFTPD at a SQL database for your user and group authentication. This means SFTP logins don't need actual system logins (although you can mix and match if you want). Naturally, this is perfect for dynamically creating and destroying SFTP accounts. …

Building and installing the Ruby mysql gem on freshly-installed Red Hat based systems sometimes produces the frustratingly ambiguous error below:

# gem install mysql
/usr/bin/ruby extconf.rb
checking for mysql_ssl_set()... no
checking for rb_str_set_len()... no
checking for rb_thread_start_timer()... no
checking for mysql.h... no
checking for mysql/mysql.h... no
*** extconf.rb failed ***
Could not create Makefile due to some reason, probably lack of
necessary libraries and/or headers.  Check the mkmf.log file for more
details.  You may need configuration options.

Searching the web for info on this error yields two basic solutions:

1. Install the mysql-devel package (this provides the mysql.h file in /usr/include/mysql/).
2. Run gem install mysql -- …