Stash only unstaged changes in Git with git stash -k; use -u to include new files, and keep the working tree clean before git stash pop.

Fixes all Flash elements on a page so that they heed DOM stacking order

Changing an ActiveRecord record’s primary key is usually unsafe, but a direct update_all can replace one id with another when it is unavoidable.

Selective Rails migrations can be moved up, down, redone, or targeted by version instead of processing the full sequence.

The following initializer provides an :alias => "my_route_name" option to restful routes in your route.rb. This simply makes the same route also available under a different ..._path / ..._url helpers.

For example,

map.resources :notes, :alias => :snippets

Gives you

notes_path, notes_url, new_note_path... #as always
snippets_path, snippets_url, new_snippet_path... #from the alias

Put this into an initializer:

Reverting only selected changes from one or more commits can be done interactively by staging parts of the diff and discarding the rest.

Compare one file against another commit or branch to inspect changes without reviewing the entire repository.

Pinning a gem version avoids accidental upgrades and keeps installs reproducible. gem install supports exact version selection with --version or -v.

As a user of Bundler you have spent significant time looking at this message:

Fetching source index for http://rubygems.org/

To make Bundler skip this index update and only use installed gems, you can use the --local option:

bundle install --local

Unfortunately this does not work with bundle update.

It is said that Bundler 1.1 will use a feature of Rubygems.org that allows partial index updates. Hopefully the wh...

Regular spaces and non-breaking spaces look alike; a small Ruby helper can return the Unicode nonbreaking space instead of using HTML entities or raw character codes.

Nested classes in modular traits can lose their original namespace, breaking references from class methods and other code. Using class self::Bar preserves the enclosing class name.

Batch-installs Ruby gems for every project in a directory, speeding up setup on a new system; native extensions still fail without required system dependencies.

Randomly selecting a database row with ActiveRecord is possible, but ORDER BY RAND() scales poorly and can overload large tables.

Cucumber step for checking whether a CSS selector is present or absent on a page with Capybara or Webrat.

Handy Bash key bindings and history shortcuts reduce typing and speed up command-line editing, repetition, and reuse of previous arguments.

Compresses JavaScript.

Thanks to habits engrained by Rails 2’s link_to_remote and remote_form_for, we expect that Rails 3 would also handle the AJAX response for our remote links and forms. But it doesn’t; it leaves that for you.

Turn an Ubuntu PC into a simple internet gateway for another computer using a second network interface and connection sharing.

Terminus is a Capybara driver where most of the driver functions are implemented in client-side JavaScript. It lets you script any browser on any machine using the Capybara API, without any browser plugins or extensions.

Sometimes you inherit a non Rails or non Rack based web app such as PHP, Perl, Java / JEE, etc. I like using cucumber for functional testing so I put together this project structure to use as a starting point for testing non Ruby web based applications.

SHOW CREATE TABLE reveals a table’s storage engine plus character set and collation, useful when comparing schemas or diagnosing encoding issues.

Controller specs can exercise non-HTML responses such as PDF, Excel, XML or JSON by setting :format or the HTTP_ACCEPT header. The format value must be a String, not a Symbol.