When upgrading Rails versions -- especially major versions -- you will run into a lot of unique issues, depending on the exact version, and depending on your app.

However, it is still possible to give some generic advice on how you want to tackle the update in principle.

If you are not really confident about upgrading Rails, have a look at Rails LTS.

How many update steps?

Besides the Rails upgrade itself, you might also want to upgrade your other gems and upgrade your Ruby version.
First decide in how many st...

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...

New Features

• Deployment ready for Opscomplete
• Copying view and controller templates over to target application during
  basics configuration or via new command katapult templates.
• "Usage" section in README rewritten: Now describes two usage scenarios.

Improvements

• Generating a fixed Gemfile.lock. Run bundle update after code generation to
  update all gems to recent versions.
• Better deployment with Webpack
• Navigation only rendered if requested
• Some minor fixes

Accessing pseudo elements via JavaScript or jQuery is often painful/impossible. However, accessing their styles is fairly simple.

Using getComputedStyle

First, find the element in question.

let element = document.querySelector('.my-element') // or $('.my-element').get(0) when using jQuery

Next, use JavaScript's getComputedStyle. It takes an optional 2nd argument to filter for pseudo elements.

let style = window.getComputedStyle(element, '::before')
let color = style.getPropertyValue('background-color...

When you are using lambdas in RSpec to assert certain changes of a call, you know this syntax:

expect { playlist.destroy }.to change { Playlist.count }.by(-1)

While you can define multiple assertions through multiple specs, you may not want to do so, e.g. for performance or for the sake of mental overhead.

Multiple expectations on the same subject

RSpec allows chaining expectations simply by using and.

expect { playlist.destroy }
  .to change { Playlist.count }.by(-1)
  .and not_change { Video.count }

...

Percent Notation

We already know that that we can create strings using the percent notation:

%(<foo="bar's ton">) is perfectly fine Ruby.

Modifier

But there is more. The curly brackets ({}) are interchangable with most unicode characters (e.g. square brackets[]).
Furthermore, you can add a "modifier" to the percent notation to control the return type of th...

Geordi uses parallel_tests if available for running the test suite. To debug an application it is very unhandy to have multiple processes as your terminal I/O will not work as expected once a breakpoint is hit.

Even parallel_tests support an option to enable a single process run, it is not possible to pass this option through geordi. But you can set the number of processes via ENV variable manually:

PARALLEL_TEST_PROCESSORS=1 bundle exec geordi cucu...

Font Awesome 5 is a comprehensive solution for vector icons on your website.

Originally, Font Awesome came as an icon font (plus stylesheets), but recently it can also be used as a pure JavaScript solution (which will render icons as inline <svg> tags), or even as SVG sprites.

All solutions have their pros and cons:

Icon font:

• little CPU load (no JavaScript)
• fonts are relatively large
• 1 extra HTTP request

Javascript + inline SVG:

• higher CPU load (needs to watch the DOM via mutation observers to ad...

Masonry is a famous library to dynamically arrange a grid of items that have different aspect ratio, like horizontal and vertical images.
Colcade is an alternative masonry-layouting library, developed by the same developer, but with a more modern approach.

It is said to have better performance while being smaller and having no dependencies. It automagically detects jQuery and defines a jQuery initializer, if present.
However, it offers [a few less features](https:...

A JavaScript error in an E2E test with Selenium will not cause your test to fail. This may cause you to miss errors in your frontend code.

Using the BrowserConsole helper below you can check your browser's error console from your E2E tests.

The following will raise BrowserConsole::ErrorsPresent if there is an error on the browser console:

BrowserConsole.assert_no_errors!

Ignoring errors

You can ignore errors by their exact message:

BrowserConsole.ignore('Browser is burning')

You can ignore errors with me...

Geordi's cucumber command has a --rerun option that reruns failing tests the given number of times. Usage:

geordi cucumber path/to/features --rerun=2
geordi cucumber path/to/features -r2

Background and how to rerun manually

Cucumber will save a file tmp/parallel_cucumber_failures.log containing the filenames and line number of the failed scenarios after a full test run. Normally you can say cucumber -p rerun (rerun is a profile defined by default in config/cucumber.yml) to rerun all failed scenarios.

Here are a few al...

Restricting access to cookies is essential for security in many web apps. For example, the session ID, the secret token used to identify a particular session, is typically stored in a cookie. Cookies have several important settings. Previously, I discussed the secure flag. This time, let’s dive into the cookie domain.

The cookie domain is an important security feature, probably even more important than the secure flag. It tells the browser that this cookie must only be sent to matching domains. Matching however, can happen in several w...

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, with the biggest difference: there is no Rails. This means:

• no defined structure (neither for code nor directories)
• no autoloading of classes, i.e. you need to require all files yourself
• no active_support niceties

Also, their scope...

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

There is a kinda secret, yet well supported CSS feature called currentColor. It's like a special CSS variable that has been supported in almost all browsers for almost all time (see linked Caniuse).

Usage

The currentColor value can be used in CSS to indicate the current value of color should be used. A common use case is setting a border color:

a.ghost
  color: white
  border: 1px solid currentColor
  &:hover
    color: red // Border color will change as well 

Note that in many cases, you can simply omit the color to ac...

Definition

A matcher is a function that returns an object with a compare key. Usually it is registered with beforeEach:

beforeEach(() => {
  jasmine.addMatchers({
  
    // Example matcher
    toBeAnything() {
      return {
        compare(actualValue, ...matcherArguments) {
           // Do some computations here ...
         
           // Return whether the actualValue matches the expectation
           return {pass: true}
         }
      }
    }
  })
})

Usage

expect(actualValue).toBeAnything(...matcherArg...

Webpacker uses Babel and Webpack to transpile modern JavaScript down to EcmaScript 5. Depending on what browser a project needs to support, the final Webpack output needs to be different. E.g. when we need to support IE11 we can rely on fewer JavaScript features. Hence our output will be more verbose than when we only need support modern browsers.

Rails 5.1+ projects often use Webpacker to preconfigure the Webpack pipeline for us. The default configuration works something like this:

1. Webpack checks w...

When you find yourself constantly ignoring a RubyMine warning, you can simple disable that warning and de-clutter your editor. E.g. in my Cucumber scenarios RubyMine underlines 90% of all lines because it does not know about spreewald, making the file really hard to read.

You can disable any unwanted inspection by opening File / Settings / Editor / Inspections and searching for the warning text.

What you disable or keep is up to your personal preference. I personally disable at least the following...

New features:

geordi delete_dumps [directory]

Recursively search for files ending in *.dump and offer to delete those. When no argument is given, two default directories are searched for dump files: the current working directory and ~/dumps (for dumps created with geordi).

geordi drop_databases

Delete local MySQL/MariaDB and Postgres databases that are not whitelisted.

Authentication is handled via PAM for Postgres and MariaDB, via .my.cnf with fallback to mysql -p for MySQL. Different connection methods can be chosen via ...

Upgrade gems

You need to update a lof gems. Make sure you don't have any version constraints in your Gemfile or your bundle update won't do anything!

Upgrade cucumber_priority:

bundle update cucumber_priority

Upgrade spreewald:

bundle update spreewald

Upgrade cucumber_factory:

bundle update cucumber_factory

Upgrade parallel_tests:

bundle update parallel_tests

Even on the latest version, parallel_tests will print some deprecation warnings due to using an older formatter A...

We often use the Then console step from spreewald in combination with geordi vnc from geordi to debug tests within a real browser. Sometimes when you type in the browser it suddenly disappears. You will only see a grey screen then.

This will always happen if you press the d key. Press the d key again and the browser will appear again.