Sinatra app as rack middleware TimesOut Rails 3 - ruby-on-rails-3

Question

While in the Rails development environment, I am attempting to add a Sinatra app as a middleware. The Sinatra app uses the geoip gem that processes a user's ip address and returns json with their city.
I can view the returned json by going directly to the example url in the browser or using curl in the command line, http://local.fqdn.org/geoip/locate.json?ip=24.18.211.123. However when I attempt to call the url with wget from within a Rails controller, the Rails app stops responding often crashing my browser and my rails server wont exit using the control+C command.
Any clue to what is happening here? Why would going directly to the url in the browser return the proper response but my call in the controller results in a Time Out?
sinatra-geoip.rb
require 'sinatra'
require 'geoip'
require 'json'
# http://localhost/geoip/locate.json?ip=24.18.211.123
#
# {
# latitude: 47.684700012207
# country_name: "United States"
# area_code: 206
# city: "Seattle"
# region: "WA"
# longitude: -122.384803771973
# postal_code: "98117"
# country_code3: "USA"
# country_code: "US"
# dma_code: 819
# }
class GeoIPServer < Sinatra::Base
get '/geoip/locate.json' do
c = GeoIP.new('/var/www/mywebsite.org/current/GeoLiteCity.dat').city(params[:ip])
body c.to_h.to_json
end
end
routes.rb
mount GeoIPServer => "/geoip"
config/environments/development.rb
Website::Application.configure do
require "sinatra-geoip"
config.middleware.use "GeoIPServer"
...
end
controller
raw_geo_ip = Net::HTTP.get(URI.parse("http://#{geoip_server}/geoip/locate.json?ip=#{request.ip}"))
#geo_ip = JSON.parse(raw_geo_ip)

Answer 1

Our solution was difficult to find. We ended up finding a method in the sinatra source code call forward.
new sinatra-geoip.rb
class GeoIPServer < Sinatra::Base
if defined?(::Rails)
get '/properties.json' do
env["geo_ip.lookup"] = geo_ip_lookup(request.ip)
forward
end
end
def geo_ip_lookup(ip = nil)
ip = ip.nil? ? params[:ip] : ip
result = GeoIP.new('/var/www/mywebsite.org/current/GeoLiteCity.dat').city(ip)
result.to_h.to_json
end
end
Essentially, we removed the /geoip/locate.json route from the file and converted it to a simple method. We needed the geoip lookup to occur when the properties.json was being called, so a new param was added with the geoip information. Then we set the new param equal to #geo_ip variable in the controller.
New properties controller
if Rails.env.development? or Rails.env.test?
# Retrieves param set by sinatra-geoip middleware.
#geo_ip = JSON.parse(env["geo_ip.lookup"] || "{}")
else
# Production and staging code
end
Rather obscure problem and solution. Hopefully it will help someone out there. Cheers.