Rails - About your application's environment

I set up a rails instance yesterday on my linux box and started it up in the development mode as usual.
From my windows box I accessed the main page (default with rails) of the application. I wanted to verify the environment that rails was loading. So I clicked on the "About your application's environment" link.

I got an error message -
For security purposes, this information is only available to local requests.


Hmm, I knew I had started my server in the development mode and by default this mode considers all requests local.

I doubled checked config/environments/development.rb and found the setting to be right...

# Show full error reports and disable caching
config.action_controller.consider_all_requests_local = true

Hmm what is going on?

From development.log I figured the controller for this request to be rails/info with the action name as properties.

%> grep -r "def properties" /usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems /*
/usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/rails-1.1.6/builtin/rails_info/rails/info_controller.rb:  def properties

Ah! So I checked out info_controller.rb

class Rails::InfoController < ActionController::Base
  def properties
    if local_request?
      render :inline => Rails::Info.to_html
    else
      render :text => '
For security purposes, this information is only available to local requests.
', :status => 500
    end
  end
end

Tracing local_request? led me to

%> grep -r 'def local_request?' /usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/*
/usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/actionpack-1.13.3/lib/action_controller/rescue.rb:      def local_request? #:doc:
%>

Looking at local_request?

      def local_request? #:doc:
        [request.remote_addr, request.remote_ip] == ["127.0.0.1"] * 2
      end

it is clear that local_request? will return false in this case since I am accessing the page from a different machine.
As I searched for local_request? again, I found this snippet in rescue.rb itself:

      def rescue_action(exception)
        log_error(exception) if logger
        erase_results if performed?

        if consider_all_requests_local || local_request?
          rescue_action_locally(exception)
        else
          rescue_action_in_public(exception)
        end
      end

Ah ha! we need to add consider_all_requests_local to our properties action as well. So I popped open app/controller/application.rb and added the following snippet

class Rails::InfoController < ActionController::Base
  def properties
    if consider_all_requests_local || local_request?
      render :inline => Rails::Info.to_html
    else
      render :text => '
For security purposes, this information is only available to local requests.
', :status => 500
    end
  end
end


class ApplicationController <  ActionController::Base
  # Pick a unique cookie name to distinguish our session data from others'
  session :session_key => '_ptracker_session_id'
end

A server restart and I got the output I wanted:

Ruby version
1.8.6 (x86_64-linux)
RubyGems version
0.9.0
Rails version
1.2.3
Active Record version
1.15.3
Action Pack version
1.13.3
Action Web Service version
1.2.3
Action Mailer version
1.3.3
Active Support version
1.4.2
Application root
/home/xxxx/ror
Environment
development
Database adapter
mysql

Hmm maybe I should submit a patch!