HTML <video> elements can automatically start playing when the autoplay attribute is set on them. Except for when they can not, e.g. on pageload, or when the element enters the DOM without user interaction, or when the browser for some other reason decided to not start playing the video.

While there is no native "autoplay failed" event to listen to, you can wait for video data to be loaded and then check if the video actually started playing.

Example

<video autoplay>
  <source src="example.mp4" type="video/mp4" />
</video>
...

Debugging performance issues in your Rails app can be a tough challenge.

To get more detailed insights consider using the rack-mini-profiler gem.

Setup with Unpoly

Add the following gems:

group :development do
  gem 'memory_profiler'
  gem 'rack-mini-profiler'
  gem 'stackprof'
end

Unpoly will interfere with the rack-mini-profiler widget, but configuring the following works okayish:

// rack-mini-profiler + unpoly
if (process...

There are two ways a logout in SAML can happen: Service Provider (SP) initiated and Identity Provider (IDP) initiated logout. I'll explain how to implement both flows with devise_saml_authenticatable.

Note

SAML also supports a SOAP and an Artifact binding to do this. This guide only refers to POST and Redirect bindings. devise_saml_authenticatable does not support SOAP and Artifact bindings.

SP initiated logout (using the Redirect Binding)

When the user clicks on Logout within the app, the app can trigger...

Starting with Rails 7.1 the production logger is set to standard out. For applications running with opscomplete ensure to keep logging to a file as before (e.g. when running bin/rails app:update).

It should be enough to change these lines in the config/environments/production.rb back to the implementation in Rails <7.1:

-  # Log to STDOUT by default
-  config.logger = ActiveSupport::Logger.new(STDOUT)
-    .tap  { |lo...

Note

Using rem only ever makes sense when the root font size is dynamic, i.e. you leave control to the user. Either by a) respecting their user agent defaults, or by b) offering multiple root font sizes in your application.

By defining @media queries in rem, they will accommodate to the root font size of your page. At a larger root font, breakpoints will be at larger widths, scaling with the font. However, there is a catch in case b) mentioned in the note above.

Relative length units in media queries are based on the initial value,...

If you are using git submodules in Gitlab CI, you might run into a "The project you were looking for could not be found or you don't have permission to view it."

Gitlab added a feature that new projects are no longer allowed to be cloned inside CI runs of other repositories by default. To fix this

• Go into the project used as a submodule
• Go to "Settings" -> "CI/CD" (if you don't see this section, enable it in "Settings" -> "General" -> "Visibility, project features, permissions")
• Go to "Token Access"
• Either disable "Limit access to ...

The standard way to abort async code is that your function takes a AbortSignal { signal } property. The caller can use this signal to send an abort request to your function. Upon receiving the request, your function should reject its promise with an error.

Async browser functions like fetch() reject their promises with a new DOMException('Message here', 'AbortError') when canceled.

This already has good browser support and can be polyfilled on older browsers.

Exa...

Turns out, Cucumber::MultilineArgument::DataTable#diff! caches some stuff. Code of the following form will not work as intended:

Then('some table should look like') do |expected_table|
  patiently do
    actual_table = calculate_actual_table
    expected_table.diff!(actual_table) # not actually patient, will keep failing if it failed the first time
  end
end

Instead, simply use

expected_table.dup.diff!(actual_table)

Developing or debugging SAML functionality can be a hassle, especially when you need to go back and forth with someone external who is managing the identity provider (IDP).
But you can setup a local keycloak server to act as your IDP to play around with. This might seam intimidating, but is actually quite simple when using docker and turning off some verification steps.

1. Start a keycloak instance using docker

`mkdir -p keycloak_data && docker run --network=host -e KEYCLOAK_ADMIN=admin -e KEYCLOAK_ADMIN...

If you need to make an HTTPS connection to a host which uses an expired certificate, do not disable certificate verifications entirely. Doing that enables e.g. man in the middle attacks.
If you accept only a single expired and known certificate, you are much less in trouble.

Setup

All the solutions described below use a verify_callback for the request's OpenSSL::X509::Store where you can specify a lambda to adjust its verification response.
Your callback must return either true or false and OpenSSL's verification result is...

Due to network or hardware failures, it can happen that one of your cronjobs will not run at the time you specify in the schedule. Your code should be built in a way that it can be re-run at a later time (when the failure is resolved).

For example, if you are synchronizing data with another service once every day, your cronjob should not only synchronize changes from the last 24 hours. If you do this and a network failure will delay the execution of your job by 5 hours, you will only synchronize changes from hour 6-29, but forget change...

This card existed before, but was outdated due to browser implementation changes. The information below is validated for the current list of browsers we support.

By default your html and body elements are only as high as the actual page content inside their container. If you only have two lines of text in your page, your html and body elements will only be around 40 pixels high, regardless of the size of your browser window.

You might be surprised by this, since setting a background on either html and `body...

Percent Notation

We already know that that we can create strings using the percent notation:

%(<foo="bar's ton">) is perfectly fine Ruby.

Modifier

But there is more. The curly brackets ({}) are interchangable with most unicode characters (e.g. square brackets[]).
Furthermore, you can add a "modifier" to the percent notation to control the return type of th...

Often people need links which are not linked directly, but should trigger execution of JavaScript.

❌ Bad workarounds

You can find a lot of workarounds for that:

• <a href="#">Do something with js!</a>
  This defines an empty anchor. This may lead the browser to let the page jump to the top when the link is clicked, unless you call preventDefault on the event. This is probably not what you want.

• <a href="#!">Do something with js!</a>
  This tells the browser to jump to an anchor !. It depends on the browser implementation wha...

When building an application that sends e-mails to users, you want to avoid those e-mails from being classified as spam. Most obvious scoring issues will not be relevant to you because you are not a spammer.

However, your application must do one thing by itself: When sending HTML e-mails, you should include a plain-text body or tools like SpamAssassin will apply a significant score penalty. Here is how to do that automatically.

1. Add premailer-rails to your Gemfile and bundle.
2. Done! ...

There are several tools for DNS debugging which offer you more or less information. Most of the time the more simple ones, like host oder nslookup will be sufficient.

host

simple DNS lookup utility.

>host heise.de
heise.de has address 193.99.144.80
heise.de has IPv6 address 2a02:2e0:3fe:1001:302::
heise.de mail is handled by 10 relay.heise.de.

nslookup

query Internet domain name servers. Nslookup has two modes: interactive and non-interactive.

>nslookup heise.de
Server:		146.254.160.30
Address:	146.254.160.3...

The RSpec matcher tests if two HTML fragments are equivalent. Equivalency means:

• Whitespace is ignored
• Types of attribute quotes are irrelevant
• Attribute order is irrelevant
• Comments are ignored

You use it like this:

html = ...
expect(html).to match_html(<<~HTML)
  <p>
    Expected content
  </p>  
HTML

You may override options from CompareXML by passing keyword arguments after the HTML string:

html = ...
expect(html).to match_html(<<~HTML, ignore_text_nodes: true)
 ...

An association defined with has_many :through will return the same record multiple times if multiple join models for the same record exist (a n:m relation). To prevent this, you need to add ->{ uniq } as second argument to has_many (below Rails 4 it is a simple option: has_many :xyz, :uniq => true).

Example

Say you have an Invoice with multiple Items. Each Item has a Product:

class Invoice < ActiveRecord::Base
  has_many :items
  has_many :products, :through => :items
end

class Item < ActiveRecord::Base
  ...

Using git checkout - you can switch back to the branch you previously worked on.

(master) $ git checkout foobar
Switched to branch 'foobar'
(foobar) $ git checkout -
Switched to branch 'master'
(master) $

This also works with other commands like git merge:

(master) $ git checkout foobar
Switched to branch 'foobar'
(foobar) $ git merge -
Merged branch 'master'

tl;dr

Prefer request specs over end-to-end tests (Capybara) to joyfully test file downloads!

Why?

Testing file downloads via Capybara is not easy and results in slow and fragile tests. We tried different approaches and the best one is just okay.

Tests for file downloads via Capybara ...

• ... are slow,
• ... are fragile (breaks CI, breaks if Selenium driver changes, ...),
• ... need workarounds for your specia...

It's 2024 and we have tools like ffmpeg, imagemagick and GPT readily available. With them, it's easy to convert texts, images, audio and video clips into each other.

For the everyday use without any parameter tweaking I'm using a collection of tiny scripts in my ~/bin folder that can then be used as bash functions. And: It's faster to use the CLI than interacting with a website and cheaper to use the API than buying GPT plus.. :-)

Usage

• text-to-image "parmiggiano cheese wedding cake, digital art"
• `text-to-audio "Yesterday I ate ...

If you want to see how long your database queries actually take, you need to disable MySQL's query cache. This can be done globally by logging into a database console, run

SET GLOBAL query_cache_type=OFF;

and restart your rails server.

You can also disable the cache on a per query basis by saying

SELECT SQL_NO_CACHE * FROM ...

You also probably want to disable Rails internal (per-request) cache. For this, wrap your code with a call to ActiveRecord::Base.uncached. For example, as an around_filter:

d...

We want to keep a changelog for all gems we maintain. There are some good practices for writing a changelog that adds value, please stick to these.

• Add a notice to the README's contribute section about the changelog
• For every release update the changelog
• Note the date format yyyy-mm-tt

What is a changelog?

A changelog is a file which contains a curated, chronologically ordered list of notable changes for each version of a project.

Why keep a changelog?

To make it easier for users and...

1. Class-level process definitions are only applied to the original file
2. Versions are generated based on the processed original file
3. Callbacks (before/after) are applied to original file and each version by itself
4. Under the hood, a version is an instance of the uploader class that has no versions
5. Version uploader and original uploader can be distinguished by checking #version_name: version uploaders return the version name, whereas the original uploader instance returns nil
6. Version instances do not have a re...