The :nth-child pseudo class is commonly used for targeting elements based on their position within a parent container, for example the third element in a list or every even-numbered item. However, :nth-child can do more.

In modern CSS specifications (Level 4), there’s an additional feature that lets you use :nth-child in combination with a list of css selectors. This way, you can ta...

You can do so much more than console.log(...)! See the attached link for a great breakdown of what the developer console can give you.

Some of my favorites:

console.log takes many arguments

E.g. console.log("Current string:", string, "Current number:", 12)

Your output can have hyperlinks to Javascript objects

E.g. console.log("Check out the current %o, it's great", location)

[Di...

When you build a JSON API you need to come up with a style to represent attributes, pagination, errors or including associated objects. Instead of reinventing the wheel, you may reuse successful API designs.

JSON API

JSON:API specifies common features found in most JSON APIs, like pagination, ordering and nested resources. The spec looks very similar to how one would build an API with Rails and uses similar patterns. Even if you don't plan on supporting the whole spec, it can still make sense to know how th...

When your Rails application server raises error, Capybara will fail your test when it clears the session after the last step. The effect is a test that passes all steps, but fails anyway.

Capybara's behavior will help you to detect and fix errors in your application code. However, sometimes your application will explode with an error outside your control. Two examples:

• A JavaScript library references a source map in its build, but forgets to package the source map
• CarrierWave cleans up an upload or cache file after the record was delet...

When you want to filter records in a model where a string column roughly matches a given term, you can use PostgreSQL’s trigram similarity search.

Writing a fuzzy query in Rails

User.where("similarity(name, ?) > 0.4", "John")

This finds all users where the name is similar to "John" with a similarity score above 0.3.

You can tune the threshold:

• Closer to 1.0 = stricter match
• Closer to 0.0 = looser match

Ordering by best match

User
  .where("similarity(name, ?) > 0.3", "John")
  .order(Arel.sql("similarity(n...

Purpose:
Interactively rebase your current branch onto main, keeping the original base commit (i.e. not rebasing onto main directly).

Use Case:
Useful when you've branched off a long-lived feature branch and want to clean up your commits without changing the original base. Afterwards you will be able to rebase one clean commit interactively onto main without going through each commit individually using git rebase -i main.

What it does:

• Opens an interactive rebase UI to choose squash/edit/fixup for each co...

When you send automated emails from a noreply@-address, and the recipient has an out of office enabled, the autoreply bounces and they get an additional email with an error message.

To prevent the recipient's auto-response and the following error message you can set the email header Auto-Submitted: auto-generated in your mailer, for example like this:

class NoReplyMailer < ApplicationMailer
  default from: 'noreply@yourapp.com', 'Auto-Submitted' => 'auto-generated'
end  

You can check the maximum client Redis database size in Sidekiq with this command.

Sidekiq.redis { |redis| puts redis.info.fetch('maxmemory_human') }
#=> 512.00M

If you just want the maximum database size for a known Redis database URL you can use the Redis Ruby client or the Redis CLI:

Redis database size via Ruby client

irb(main):002> Redis.new(url: 'redis://localhost:16380/1').info.fetch('maxmemory_human')
=> "512.00M"

Redis database size via CLI

$ redis-c...

If you want to fill in textareas with multiple lines of text (containing line breaks / new lines) you can use Cucumber's docstrings:

And I fill in "Comment" with:
  """
  This is a long comment.
  With multiple lines.

  And paragraphs.
  """

The step definition is part of the spreewald gem

You can use local copies of gems in your Gemfile like this:

gem 'spreewald', path: '~/gems/spreewald'

As soon as you have bundled your project with the local copy of the gem, all code changes in the copy will be available on your project. So you can for example set a debugger or add console output in the gem and use it from your project.
If you checked out the gem with your versioning tool, you can easily reset your changes afterwards or make a pull request for the gem if you improved it.

Don't commit a Gemfile with local path...

To safely transport an arbitrary string within a URL, you need to percent-encode characters that have a particular meaning in URLs, like & or =.

If you are using Rails URL helpers like movies_path(:query => ARBITRARY_STRING_HERE), Rails will take care of the encoding for you. If you are building URLs manually, you need to follow this guide.

Ruby

In Ruby, use CGI.escape:

# ✅ good
CGI.escape('foo=foo&bar=bar')
=> "foo%3Dfoo%26bar%3Dbar"

Do not ever use `URI.en...

Added reference to git who.

Orca is a Linux screen reader. Since it is part of the GNOME project it should come preinstalled with Ubuntu installations.
To turn on the screen reader you can either go to Settings > Accessibility and then activate Screen Reader in the "Seeing" section or you can simply type orca in your terminal.

Note

It may feel quite strange in the beginning to use a screen reader. It is constantly commenting on everything you do and every application you visit will be read aloud.

Once you started your screen reader you can simply navigate to w...

In Rails, the implicit_order_column (added in Rails 6) is a configuration option that helps you define the default sorting behavior of ActiveRecord queries when no explicit ORDER BY clause is provided. This option allows you to specify a column that Rails will use to automatically sort records in a particular order when no specific ordering is given.

Since the id is typically the primary key and automatically indexed, Rails will default t...

When you need to add a event listener to hundreds of elements, this might slow down the browser.

An alternative is to register an event listener at the root of the DOM tree (document). Then wait for events to bubble up and check whether the triggering element (event.target) matches the selector before you run your callback.

This technique is called event delegation.

Performance considerations

Because you only register a single listener, registering is ...

When your Cucumber feature needs to browse the page HTML, and you are not sure how to express your query as a clever CSS or XPath expression, there is another way: You can use all and find to grep through the DOM and then perform your search in plain Ruby.

Here is an example for this technique:

Then /^I should see an image with the file...

If you already selected an element and want to get its parent, you can call find(:xpath, '..') on it.

To get the grand-parent element, call find(:xpath, '../..').

Example

Find a link which contains a twitter icon and check that it links to the correct page:

<a href="http://twitter.com/">
  <i class="icon is-twitter"></i>
</a>

link = page.find("a .icon.is-twitter").find(:xpath, '..')
expect(link[:href]).to eq("http://twitter.com/")

About XPath

There is a good overview on XPath syntax on [w3schools](htt...

For Selenium tests, your browser starts in your local timezone, or whatever your system's environment specifies.
This is usually good enough. To test any timezone-dependent behavior in Chrome, you can change the time zone using the Chrome DevTools Protocol.

Example

Chrome accepts any IANA time zone name, like "Europe/Berlin" or "Asia/Tokyo".
Here is the relevant command for Capybara:

page.driver.browser.execute_cdp('Emulation.setTimezoneOverride', timezoneId: 'Asia/Tokyo')
``...

Why Rails has multiple schema formats

When you run migrations, Rails will write your current database schema into db/schema.rb. This file allows to reset the database schema without running migrations, by running rails db:schema:load.

The schema.rb DSL can serialize most common schema properties like tables, columns or indexes. It cannot serialize more advanced database features, like views, procedures, triggers or custom ditionaries. In these cases you must switch to a SQL based schema format:

# in application.rb
config.a...

DirectUpload allows you to upload files to your file storage without having to wait for the form to submit. It creates AJAX requests to persist the file within your form and wraps them in a little API. This card will show you how to use it in order to create in-place file uploads with progress and a remove button.

This is basic functionality, you may add additional elements, styles and logic to make this look fancy, but the core functionality is the same. I created a file upload that looks like this:

![Image](/makandra/625023/attachments/3...

Here is a workaround for when you want to use text-wrap: balance but must also render nicely for browsers that don't support it (mostly Safari <17.5).

Step 1: Put some <br>s into your HTML

First, place explicit line breaks that should work for most cases.
This depends on your use case and is affected by e.g. container widths or user content.

<div class="my-element">
  <p>
    Average score
    <br>
 ...

ActiveStorage does not provide any built-in way of implementing authentication for the available DirectUpload endpoint in Rails. When using DirectUpload as JS wrapper in the frontend, be aware that its Rails endpoint is public by default, effectively allowing anyone to upload an unlimited amount of files to your storage.

The DirectUploadController from @rails/activestorage bypasses your form controller because it uploads the file using an AJAX request that runs directly, before any form roundtrip happens. This is a comfortable solutio...

Sometimes you want to fetch associations for an ActiveRecord that you already loaded, e.g. when it has deeply nested associations.

Edge Rider gives your models a static method preload_associations. The method can be used to preload associations for loaded objects like this:

class UsersController < ApplicationController
  def show
    @user = User.find(params[:id])
    @user.preload_associations(threads: { posts: :author }, messages: :sender)
  end
end

The attached initializers re...

Form fields can be rendered as noneditable by setting the disabled or the readonly attribute. Be aware of the differences:

disabled fields

• don’t post to the server
• don’t get focus
• are skipped while tab navigation
• available for button, fieldset, input, select, textarea, command, keygen, optgroup, option

Browser specific behavior:

• IE 11: text inputs that are descendants of a disabled fieldset appear disabled but the user can still interact with them
• Firefox: selecting text in a disabled text field is no...