Remember to have a "catch-all" in your nginx configuration when using virtual domains

I got a bit stressed when I saw that a beta for a service I am working on was out in the open. I checked every config file and firewalls, and could not see why the site would respond to a different domain and the ip, when the server_name in nginx was set.

I cannot stress this enough: You need a catch-all in your nginx config!

If you do not have a server config block to catch all "none-virtual" domains, nginx just picks the first available configuration. Quite different from what I was used to with apache. And if you have private and public sites on a mixed box, that might be mission-critical if sensitive data gets out...

So do yourself a favor and throw this into your nginx config before the virtual hosts are loaded:

 server {
  root /usr/share/nginx/www;
  index index.html index.htm;

  location / {
    try_files $uri $uri/ /404.htm =404;
  }
 }


 ##
 # Virtual Host Configs
 ##
        # .... 

Without the above settings, your site will be accessible on any domain pointing to the server, and any IP the server hosts.

Get the dot notation of a embedded Mongoid element

I needed to get the dot notation for embedded documents to perform queries using the given dot notation.

I could not find a "standard" way of doing just that, so here are some helper methods I use in a class. (Part of soon-to-come BoxCMS)

This Gist uses Mongoid metadata and reflect_on_all_associations, so it might break for newer versions of mongoid at some point.

Using dot notation queries in mongoid, makes it easy to dig for even the deepest "weird" embedded structures you might have.

Example of query:
»  Box::Page.where("rows.boxes.box_items.is_template_object" => false).first

Dot notations in mongodb are a powerful tool, but use it wisely unless you are indexing "more than you should".
Basic usage: Call dot_notation_for_element(embedded_element) to get the dot notation all the way up to the parent document, excluding the parent documents name/embedded name.