In ruby you can easily read and write CSVs with the standard CSV library class.

On top of this, you can use the gem smarter_csv for reading (not writing) CSVs in a more comfortable way:

• Keep in mind, that the development of this gem is in an unknown state and the 2.0 release seems to happen never
• The API will change completely for 2.0, so you might find a bunch of unrelated documentation for 1.2
• It allows you to …

The rendered font often depends on the local font your system provides, therefore you often find a rule like below in the computed style for an element:

font-family: Menlo,Monaco,Lucida Console,Liberation Mono,DejaVu Sans Mono,Bitstream Vera Sans Mono,Courier New,monospace,serif

This means if your system has a font named Menlo, it will render the text with this font. Otherwise it will try Monaco and so on. For the last two fallback options the system is free to use any monospace font or if not present any serif font. At lea…

When you generate a URL in a mailer view, ActionMailer will raise an error unless you previously configured it which hostname to use. Configuring the correct hostname is quite annoying when you have multiple deployment targets with different hostnames, e.g. a staging server and a production server.

Using the hack below you don't need to configure a default hostname for your mailers. They will always use the hostname for the current request:

class ApplicationController < ActionController::Base

  before_filter :make_action_maile...

Next time you have to do more than trivial CSS changes on a project, you probably want to have live CSS reloading, so every time you safe your css, the browser updates automatically. It's pretty easy to set up and will safe you a lot of time in the long run. It will also instantly reload changes to your html views.

Simply follow the instructions below, taken from blog.55minutes.com.

Install CSS live reload (only once per project)

1. Add th…

The Git stash does not work like a one-slot clipboard and you might shoot yourself in the foot if you pretend otherwise.

In particular git stash apply does not remove the stashed changes from the stash. That means you will probably apply the wrong stash when you do git stash apply after a future stashing.

To keep your stash clean, you can use

git stash pop

instead.

Another way to look at it:

git stash pop 

is the same as

git stash apply && git stash drop

Notice: In case of a conflict git will not pop th…

Puma allows you to specify the max and min threads. In development this could be useful if you use a debugger, but do not want to overflow the console with other request like from ActionCable. Then just set the max threads to 1 and the other requests have to wait.

puma -t 0:1 -p 3000

Cucumber factory supports polymorphic associations out of the box. Just keep in mind that you need to use named associations for this purpose.

class Person < ApplicationModel
  has_many :buildings, inverse_of: :owner
end

class Company < ApplicationModel
  has_many :buildings, inverse_of: :owner
end

class Building < ApplicationModel
  belongs_to :owner, optional: true, polymorphic: true
end

Works

```
Given there is a customer with the name "Nice customer"
And there is a bui…

Cucumber has an output format that prints step definitions only. You can use this to find unused ones:

1. Temporarily add require_relative 'env' to the top of the first file in features/support. --dry-run makes Cucumber skip loading env.rb.
2. Open a really wide terminal window.
3. bundle exec cucumber --dry-run --format stepdefs | grep -B1 'NOT MATCHED' --no-group-separator | grep features/step_definitions

This will print all unused step definitions from your project – however, the result will include false positives. Step…

TL;DR In blueprints, always wrap associations in blocks.

# Broken
Task.blueprint(:vacation) do
  project Project.make(:vacation)
  hours 8
  accounting_method 'none'
end

# Correct
Task.blueprint(:vacation) do
  project { Project.make(:vacation) }
  hours 8
  accounting_method 'none'
end

Without the block, Project.make will only run once when the blueprint is parsed (usually when RSpec is loaded), which is not what you want.

First find the reference for the entry you want through looking at the stash:

$ git stash list
stash@{0}: WIP on feature/foo
stash@{1}: WIP on feature/bar
stash@{2}: WIP on fix/baz

Now you can simply use that reference, but curly braces must be escaped:

git stash pop stash@\{1\}

or quoted:

git stash apply "stash@{1}"

Quick reminder to [not shoot yourself in the foot](https://makandracards.com/makandra/634-use-the-git-stash-withou…

When upgrading Rails versions – especially major versions – you will run into a lot of unique issues, depending on the exact version, and depending on your app.

However, it is still possible to give some generic advice on how you want to tackle the update in principle.

How many update steps?

Besides the Rails upgrade itself, you might also want to

• upgrade your other gems
• upgrade your Ruby versions

First decide in how many steps you want to run the upgrade. I suggest

• To do a separate step for each major rails versions. So, if…

The Ace editor is a great enhancement when you want users to supply some kind of code (HTML, JavaScript, Ruby, etc).
It offers syntax highlighting and some neat features like auto-indenting.

Integrating it with Webpack as described in the documentation – by using ace-builds and ace-builds/webpack-resolver – failed pretty hard for me. Maybe because Rails' Webpacker is still on Webpack 2.
The following works for Ruby on Rails with Webpacker / Webpack 2.

1. Do not use the `ace-builds…

Rails migrations allow you to use a change method whose calls are automatically inverted for the down path. However, if you need to some path-specific logic (like SQL UPDATE statements) you can not define up and down methods at the same time.

If you were to define define all 3 of them, Rails would only run change and ignore up and down. However, Rails 4+ features a helper method called reversible:

class MyMigration < ActiveRecord::Migration

  def...