How can you change the User Agent string for a Heroku app?

Question

I've got a Ruby on Rails app running on Heroku. One feature of the app is that it fetches feeds from a webserver. The user agent is simply "Ruby."

I'd like to create a more friendly and informative user agent string for webmasters. Does anyone know how to do this this?

Answer 1

Your HTTP client should have an option for setting request headers. In this case, you'll just need to change the 'User-Agent' header.

If you use Net::HTTP, something like this should work:

req = Net::HTTP::Get.new(uri)
req['User-Agent'] = 'MyApp (see http://example.com)'

res = Net::HTTP.start(uri.hostname, uri.port) {|http|
  http.request(req)
}