Cheating Rails: Calling render() outside your Controllers

Our new scope-based authorization gem for Ruby on Rails has been released. This might one day replace Aegis as our standard authorization solution.

It is common in Rails 3.0 applications that you want to provide default views for a group of controllers. Let’s say you have a bunch of controllers inside the Admin namespace and you would like each action to fallback to a default template. So if ...

At makandra, we've built a few gems over the years. Some of these are quite popular: spreewald (> 1M downloads), active_type (> 1M downloads), and geordi (> 200k downloads)

Developing a Ruby gem is different from developing Rails applications, w...

Artifice allows you to replace the Net::HTTP subsystem of Ruby with an equivalent that routes all requests to a Rack application.

You can use Sinatra, raw Rack, or even Rails as your application, allowing you to build up an equivalent to the remo...

When CoffeeScript was added to Rails 3.1 they forgot one very important part, the ability to use it when responding to JavaScript (JS) requests!

In Rails 3.1 it’s incredibly easy to build your application’s JavaScript using CoffeeScript, however ...

If you’re testing the behavior of deprecated code in your Ruby project, the warning messages littered throughout your spec output is incredibly noisy.

You could silence all warnings with ::ActiveSupport::Deprecation.silenced = true, but you might...

This card explains how to generate an entity relationship diagram for your Rails application.
We also show how to limit your ERD to a subset of models, e.g. models inside a namespace.

Generating a full ERD

Option A: RubyMine

1. Right-cli...

Building application assets with esbuild is the new way to do it, and it's great, especially in combination with Sprockets (or Propshaft on Rails 7).
You might be missing some convenience features, though.

Here we cover one specific issue:
Once y...

Rails 2.3 has a ton of really nice functionality locked up in monolithic components. I’ve posted quite a bit about how we’ve opened up a lot of that functionality in ActionPack, making it easier to reuse the router, dispatcher, and individual part...

Stop writing your own random string generators. Rails does this for you.