When restoring a PostgreSQL dump using pg_restore, you usually add the --clean flag to remove any existing data from tables.

Note that this only removes data from tables that are part of the dump and will not remove any extra tables. You need to do that yourself.

In Rails 3+, you can use:

class Project
  delegate :url_helpers, to: 'Rails.application.routes'

  def project_path
    url_helpers.project_path(self)
  end
end

For Rails 2, use the attached Modularity trait. It will give any Ruby class a method #url_writer, on which you can call URL helpers:

class Foo
  does 'write_urls'
  def self.class_method
    url_writer.session_path
  end
  def instance_method
    url_writer.project_path(5)
  end
end

Why string sorting sucks in vanilla Ruby

Ruby's sort method doesn't work as expected with German umlauts:

["Schwertner", "Schöler"].sort
=> ["Schwertner", "Schöler"] # you probably expected ["Schöler", "Schwertner"]

Also numbers in strings will be sorted character by character which you probably don't want:

["1", "2", "11"].sort
# => ["1", "11", "2"] # you probably expected ["1", "2", "11"]

Also the sorting is case sensitive:

["a", "B"].sort
# => ["B", "a"] # yo...

A great two-part article about various hacks you can use to create great-looking screen designers when you're not a designer.

Part 1 contains:

• Light comes from the sky
• Black and white first
• Double your whitespace

Part 2 contains:

• Learn the methods of overlaying text on images
• Make text pop— and un-pop
• Only use good fonts
• Steal like an artist

I used this Code Snippet quite often to debug issues with mails on staging and production servers. It allows you to send a custom mail directly from the console.

ActionMailer::Base.mail(
  from: "system@example.com", 
  to: "user@example.com",  
  subject: "Test mail from #{Rails.application.class}", 
  body: "This is just a test."
).deliver_now

I had this error:

> gem install bundler
Successfully installed bundler-2.0.1
1 gem installed

> bundle install
Traceback (most recent call last):
	2: from /home/henning/.rbenv/versions/2.5.1/bin/bundle:23:in `<main>'
	1: from /home/henning/.rbenv/versions/2.5.1/lib/ruby/2.5.0/rubygems.rb:308:in `activate_bin_path'
/home/henning/.rbenv/versions/2.5.1/lib/ruby/2.5.0/rubygems.rb:289:in `find_spec_for_exe': can't find gem bundler (>= 0.a) with executable bundle (Gem::GemNotFoundException)

The cause was that Bundler 2 requires RubyG…

Rails has generic error messages you can define in your locale .yml files. You may override those application-wide error messages using model or attribute scope like this:

en:
  activerecord:
    errors:
      messages:
        invalid: is invalid # used for any invalid attribute in the application
      models:
        car:
          invalid: does not work # used for invalid car attributes
          attributes:
            driver:
              invalid: not allowed to drive # used if the car's ...

Rails 3+ allows you to join two scopes from arbitrary sources by calling the merge method:

scope1 = User.where(:email => 'foo@bar.com')
scope2 = User.where(:first_name => 'hans')
merged_scope = scope1.merge(scope2)

merged_scope.to_a will now trigger a query for the combined scope chain:

SELECT `users`.* FROM `users` WHERE `users`.`email` = 'foo@bar.com' AND `users`.`first_name` = 'hans'

If you are joining two models, you can also [merge scopes for different models](http://blog.thefrontiergroup.com.au/2011/03/composing…

To test whether two arrays have the same elements regardless of order, RSpec gives you the =~ matcher:

actual_array.should =~ expected_array

If either side is an ActiveRecord scope rather than an array, you should call to_a on it first, since =~ does not play nice with scopes:

actual_scope.to_a.should =~ expected_scope.to_a

When building an application that sends e-mails to users, you want to avoid those e-mails from being classified as spam. Most obvious scoring issues will not be relevant to you because you are not a spammer.

However, your application must do one thing by itself: When sending HTML e-mails, you should include a plain-text body or tools like SpamAssassin will apply a significant score penalty. Here is how to do that automatically.

1. Add premailer-rails to your Gemfile and bundle.
2. Done! …

Scrolling overflowing elements with JavaScript

HTML elements with overflow-y: auto or overflow-y: scroll will get a scrollbar when their content is higher than their own height.

When you scroll an element , the element's scrollTop property is updated with the scrollbar's new position. You can also set element.scrollTop = 30 to scroll the element to a vertical pixel position counted from the top.

Scrolling the main viewport with JavaScript

The browser's main docment viewport is also scrollable by default. The element that c…