Adding Jasmine JavaScript specs to a Webpack(er) project

The goal is to get Jasmine specs running in a Rails project using Webpacker, with the browser based test runner. Should be easily adaptable to a pure Webpack setup.

Image

Step 1: Install Jasmine

yarn add jasmine-core

Step 2: Add two separate packs

Since we do not want to mix Jasmine into our regular Javascript, we will create two additional packs. The first only contains Jasmine and the test runner. The second will contain our normal application code and the specs themselves.

We cannot...

ActiveType 1.2 supports "change_association"

With ActiveType 1.2 you can modify associations (has_many etc.) after they have been defined.

One common use case for this is to change an association inside a form model, like this:

class Credential < ActiveRecord::Base
end

class User < ActiveRecord::Base
  has_many :credentials
end

class SignUpCredential < ActiveType::Record[Credential]
end

class SignUp < ActiveType::Record[User]
  change_association :credentials, class_name: 'SignUpCredential'
end

Now, if you load `credentials...

How to recognize CVE-2019-5418

If you get requests with values for formats like this:

{:locale=>[:de], :formats=>["../../../../../../../../../../etc/services{{"], :variants=>[], :handlers=>[:erb, :builder, :raw, :ruby, :coffee, :haml]}

or fails like this:

Invalid query parameters: invalid %-encoding (../../../../../../../../../etc/passwd%%0000.html)

Someone tries to exploit CVE-2019-5418.
If you use the latest Rails (or latest Rails LTS) you're...

Heads up: Capybara 3's text matchers no longer squish whitespace by default

Until Capybara 2, node finders that accept a text option were able to find nodes based on rendered text, even if it spans over multiple elements in the HTML. Imagine a page that includes this HTML:

<div class='haystack'>
  Hi!
  <br>
  Try to match me.
</div>

Even though the text is separated by a <br> tag in the HTML, it is matched until Capybara 2 which used to "squish" text prior to the comparison.

# Capyabara 1 or 2
page.find(...

Webpack: Automatically generating an icon font from .svg files

Over the years we have tried several solution to have vector icons in our applications. There are many ways to achieve this, from SVGs inlined into the HTML, SVGs inlined in CSS, JavaScript-based solutions, to icon fonts.

Out of all these options, the tried and true icon font seems to have the most advantages, since

  • icon fonts are supported everywhere
  • they perform well and require no JavaScript at all
  • their icons align nicely with text
  • their icons automatically inherit color and size of the surrounding text

The big issue used to b...

Capybara: Testing file downloads

Download buttons can be difficult to test, especially with Selenium. Depending on browser, user settings and response headers, one of three things can happen:

  • The browser shows a "Save as..." dialog. Since it is a modal dialog, we can no longer communicate with the browser through Selenium.
  • The browser automatically downloads the file without prompting the user. For the test it looks like nothing has happened.
  • The browser shows a binary document in its own window, like a PDF. Capybara/Selenium freaks out because there is no HTML docum...

Better compression for /boot partition

If you struggle with a /boot partition that is too small for updates, and you are too intimidated by the way to resize your /boot partition, there might be an easier fix:

It is possible to configure a better compression algorithm for the images in /boot. To do this, edit /etc/initramfs-tools/initramfs.conf and change the existing line to

COMPRESS=xz

Then rebuild the images using

sudo update-initramfs -u -k all

If you get an error during the last step, please immediately get help, because otherwise...

SameSite cookies

TL;DR Most web applications do not require action on this. SameSite=None (old browser default) will continue to work, and SameSite=Lax (new Chrome default, gradually rolled out) is an even better default for cookies. Set SameSite=Strict only for extra security in special cases (see below). If your application is rendered in an iframe (e.g. a video player or some news stream), you need to configure its relevant cookies as SameSite=None.


The SameSite cookie attribute targets **c...

Self-expiring URLs with Apache

When delivering non-public uploaded files (images, documents etc), one has to decide whether and how to do authorization. The usual approaches are:

  • Using send_file with a regular controller. This is secure, but potentially slow, especially for large collections of images.
  • Using unguessable URLs. This is fast (because Apache can deliver assets without going through Rails), but less secure.

When going with the "unguessable URL" approach, it is possible to somewhat increase security by using expiring URLs. The idea is to encode the expi...

Migration from the Asset Pipeline to Webpacker

This is a short overview of things that are required to upgrade a project from the Asset Pipeline to Webpacker. Expect this upgrade to take a few days even the diff is quite small afterwards.

Preparations

1. Find all libraries that are bundled with the asset pipeline. You can check the application.js and the application.css for require and import statements. The source of a library is most often a gem or a vendor directory.
2. Find an working example for each library in the application and write it down.
3. Find out the ver...

ActionMailer: Previewing mails directly in your email client

In Rails, we usually have a mailer setup like this:

class MyMailer < ActionMailer::Base

  def newsletter
    mail to: 'receiver@host.tld',
      from: 'sender@host.tld',
      subject: 'My mail'
  end

end

If you want to preview your mail in the browser, you can use the Action Mailer Preview. To inspect the mail directly in your email client, just create an .eml file and open it with your client:

mail = MyMailer.newsletter
Fil...

HTML emails with inline stylesheets and webpacker

Many mail clients do not support external style sheets. Some even require all styling inline, which means you'll have to do your styling inline. For Rails applications, you can use Roadie or premailer, which lets you keep your well-structured CSS files and do the inlining for you.

See Designing HTML email

Since Roadie is now in passive maintenance mode, we go with premailer:

Include premailer in your Gemfile:

gem 'premailer-ra...

CSS: Flex and "min-width"

min-width is known as a CSS property that can be set to define a least width for an element. Surprisingly, it can also be used to set something that feels like max-width.

min-width in a flex context

While the default min-width value is 0 (zero), for flex items it is more like "auto". This can make block elements take up much more space than desired, even stretching their container beyond the screen edge on small screens.

![Image](/makandra/66994/attach...

Using local fonts with Webpack / Webpacker

When we want to use our own (or bought) fonts in an application with Webpack(er), we have two options. We can

  • put the fonts directly into your Webpack's assets folder or
  • write an npm package with an own sass file that can be imported from the Webpack manifest.

Load fonts from your assets folder

The first option turns out to be straightforward: Import the stylesheets in the index.js of the pack you're using:

// webpack_source_path/application/index.js

import './stylesheets/reset'
import...

Rails: Passing array values to tag helpers like link_to

From at least Rails 4, the ActionView tag helper turns Array values of HTML options into a single space-separated string.
This means you can pass an array to :class options:

extra_classes = %w[one two]

= link_to 'Dashboard', root_path, class: ['btn', 'btn-primary', *extra_classes]
=> <a href="/" class="btn btn-primary one two">Dashboad</a>

= content_tag 'div', 'Hello World', class: %w[alert alert-info]
=> <div class="alert alert-info">Hello World</div>...

Upgrade guide for moving a Rails app from Webpack 3 to Webpack 4

Webpacker is Rails' way of integrating Webpack, and version 4 has been released just a few days ago, allowing us to use Webpack 4.

I successfully upgraded an existing real-world Webpack 3 application. Below are notes on everything that I encountered.
Note that we prefer not using the Rails asset pipeline at all and serving all assets through Webpack for the sake of consistency.

Preparations

  • Remove version locks in Gemfile for webpacker
  • Remove version locks in package.json for webpack and webpack-dev-server
  • Install by ca...

Carrierwave: Built-in resize methods

Carrierwave includes some handy helper methods you can use to resize your images. Here is a quick summary of them, if you need more details read the docs. You can also use all command line options from RMagick directly if these helpers are not good enough for you.

resize_to_limit(width, height)
resize_to_fit(width, height)
resize_to_fi...

JavaScript without jQuery

This is a presentation from 2019-01-21.

Summary

  • We want to move away from jQuery in future projects
  • Motivations are performance, bundle size and general trends for the web platform.
  • The native DOM API is much nicer than it used to be, and we can polyfill the missing pieces
  • Unpoly 0.60.0 works with or without jQuery

Is jQuery slow?

From: Sven
To: unpoly@googlegroups.com
Subject: performance on smartphones and tablets

Hello

I just used your framework in one project and must say,
I am really pleased with it -- but o...

How not to turn your application into a spam relay

Spammers have started abusing other application to send their spam. This works like this:

  • The application has some form that allows to send e-mails to arbitrary users. This can be something like a newsletter sign-up with a double-opt in, a registration confirmation e-mail (or even password reset e-mail), or something similar.
  • The e-mail also includes some reflected text. For example, a user may be able to give their name, and the name is used within the e-mail. The spammer will then abuse that text to include his advertisment.

Potentia...

Auto-generating plain-text bodies for HTML e-mails in Rails apps

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! ...

Upgrading Ruby from 1.8.7 to 2.3.5

Suggested Workflow

Set the ruby version in .ruby-version to 2.3.5, then perform these steps one by one, fixing errors as they occur:

  1. Update gems as listed below, and bundle
  2. Boot a Rails console - see below for a list of changes you will probably need
  3. Run Specs with --backtrace option
  4. Run Cucumber features (with Geordi's --debug option)
  5. When all tests are green, look through your Gemfile and remove as many version constraints as possible.
  6. Boot the application in different environements to spot further issues, e...

Ruby: Reading and writing CSVs

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

Here is an example...

How to: Use Ace editor in a Webpack project

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.

For Webpack 3+

Integrate as described in the documentation. For example load ace Editor like this:

  function loadAceEditor() {
    return import(/* webpackChunkName: "ace" */ 'ace-builds/src-noconflict/ace').then(() => {
      return import(/* webpackChunkName: "ace" */ 'ace-builds/webpack-r...

Rubymine FileType mismatch

If your Rubymine does not recognize a file type correctly although you have entered the unmistakeable file extension like material_orders_controller.rb, this may help you:

Causing the Problem

Sometimes you create a new file and forget to enter the ending like material_orders_controller
Rubymine handles such files per default as simple txt files.
You delete this file and create a new one with correct ending: material_orders_controller.rb. But still Rubymine treats this file as text file, no highlighting is available.

What happene...