While reviewing Brian Marick's book "Scripting for Testers" (due out later this year or early next), I discovered that some of the internet access RUBY commands and scripts always failed when I tried them from work. Here's the weird thing - the same commands and scripts worked from my home computer. So what gives?
I found the answer when I googled comp.lang.ruby and tinkered around in IRB from my work computer. It turned out to be the Proxy Server at work. For lack of a better place to store this nugget of knowledge, this seems like a good place for now.
THE PROBLEM:
Open a command prompt on a Windows machine, and launch IRB. Issue the following commands:
----
irb(main):001:0> require 'open-uri'
=> true
irb(main):002:0> url = 'http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0974514055'
=> "http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0974514055"
irb(main):003:0> page = open(url)
Errno::EBADF: Bad file descriptor - connect(2)
from c:/ruby/lib/ruby/1.8/net/http.rb:562:in `initialize'
from c:/ruby/lib/ruby/1.8/net/http.rb:562:in `connect'
from c:/ruby/lib/ruby/1.8/timeout.rb:48:in `timeout'
from c:/ruby/lib/ruby/1.8/timeout.rb:76:in `timeout'
from c:/ruby/lib/ruby/1.8/net/http.rb:562:in `connect'
from c:/ruby/lib/ruby/1.8/net/http.rb:555:in `do_start'
from c:/ruby/lib/ruby/1.8/net/http.rb:544:in `start'
from c:/ruby/lib/ruby/1.8/open-uri.rb:245:in `open_http'
from c:/ruby/lib/ruby/1.8/open-uri.rb:629:in `buffer_open'
from c:/ruby/lib/ruby/1.8/open-uri.rb:167:in `open_loop'
from c:/ruby/lib/ruby/1.8/open-uri.rb:165:in `open_loop'
from c:/ruby/lib/ruby/1.8/open-uri.rb:135:in `open_uri'
from c:/ruby/lib/ruby/1.8/open-uri.rb:531:in `open'
from c:/ruby/lib/ruby/1.8/open-uri.rb:86:in `open'
from (irb):3
----
THE SOLUTION:
You need to add the Proxy Server address (and user & password, if required) to the URL you are trying to access. Here's an example of something that worked for me from my work machine (replacing the relevant proxy address as required, of course):
----
require 'net/http'
host = 'www.amazon.com'
path = '/gp/product/0974514055'
proxy_addr = 'your.proxy.host'
proxy_port = 8080
response = Net::HTTP::Proxy(proxy_addr, proxy_port).get_response(host,
path)
----
=> response.body now returns the page source, just like it does from my home computer. (Response '200')
The second problem I had accessing a remote page was fixed with the following:
----
require 'open-uri'
url = 'http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0974514055'
proxy_addr = 'http://your.proxy.host:'
proxy_port = 8080
page = open(url, :proxy => (proxy_addr + proxy_port.to_s))
text = page.read; nil
----
Note that the proxy_addr is slightly different here than with the 'net/http' commands above. (You could probably put it all in one variable here.)
If your Proxy server requires Username and Password, then the open command will be longer. (Luckily I don't need to enter that here at my work.)
I don't have any RUBY scripts that do this sort of thing yet, but I was happy to figure out the solution anyway. Nice change of pace. Ruby totally rocks. I have yet to find something that I can't do with it for testing automation.
