How to fix zero-byte downloads with Rails 3 and Apache / Passenger

When you use the send_file method to send a local file to the browser, you can save resources on the application server by setting the :x_sendfile option to true. This option i...

After switching to Rails 3 you may get a LoadError with the following message when trying to use your application via passenger:
no such file to load -- dispatcher

Your Passenger version is most likely out of date.

Update the gem, then ins...

General

Programatically invoke Rails generators

Require the generator, instantiate it and invoke it (because generators are Thor::Groups, you need to invoke them with invoke_all). Example:

  require 'generators/wheelie/haml...

Add deprecation warnings and their solution or link to available solutions.

Global access to Rake DSL methods is deprecated. Please include Rake::DSL into classes and modules which use the Rake DSL methods.
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Simplecov is a code coverage tool. This helps you to find out which parts of your application are not tested.

Integrating this in a rails project with rspec, cucumber and parallel_tests is easy.

1. Add i...

Add gem 'database_cleaner' to your Gemfile. Then:

Cucumber & Rails 3+

# features/support/database_cleaner.rb

DatabaseCleaner.clean_with(:deletion) # clean once, now
DatabaseCleaner.strategy = :transaction
Cucumber::Rails::Database.java...

tl;dr: Upgrade the gem to at least 4.0.1

When you use rspec_rails in a version < 4 with Rails 6.1 you may encounter an error like this:

Failure/Error:
  raise WrongScopeError,
    "`#{name}` is not available from within an example (e.g. an ...

spring ...

The most obvious way to use spring is to call it explicitly:

spring rails console
spring rake db:migrate

Binstubs

Binstubs are wrapper scripts around executables. In Rails they live inside bin/. If you...

1. Saving files to a directory that is not shared between deploys or servers

If you save your uploads to a made up directory like "RAILS_ROOT/uploads", this directory goes away after every deploy (since every release gets a new). Also this di...

When Paperclip attachments should only be downloadable for selected users, there are three ways to go.
The same applies to files in Carrierwave.
...