RubyMine: Efficiently filtering results in the "Finder" overlay
RubyMine comes with a nice way to grep through your project's files: The finder (ctrl + shift + f
). Don't be discouraged about the notice 100+ matches in n+ files
if your searched keyword is too general or widely used in your project.
RubyMine comes with a few ways to narrow down the resulting list, don't hesitate to apply those filters to speed up your search. Your keybinding might vary based on your personal settings.
File mask (alt + k
)
If you already know the file extension of your ...
How to make RubyMine aware of Cucumber steps defined in gems
If your Ruby project includes a gem like Spreewald that comes with some external step definition, RubyMine does not know about them by default and will highlight the step as an undefined reference:
To link these external step definitions to RubyMine, add the corresponding gems to your RubyMine-Settings:
- Go to Settings (
ctrl + alt + s
) - Go to Languages and Frameworks
- Go to Cucumber
- There, add your gem (e.g "spreewald") via the little "+" from the b...
How to get a backtrace if rspec (or any other ruby process) hangs with no output
If rspec hangs with no output and you dont get a backtrace neither with --backtrace
nor by just killing it with crtl-c,
you can put the following in your spec/spec_helper.rb
:
puts "rspec pid: #{Process.pid}"
trap 'USR1' do
threads = Thread.list
puts
puts "=" * 80
puts "Received USR1 signal; printing all #{threads.count} thread backtraces."
threads.each do |thr|
description = thr == Thread.main ? "Main thread" : thr.inspect
puts
puts "#{description} backtrace: "
puts thr.backtrace.join("\n")
end
...
Unpoly: Testing values for presence or blankness
In Ruby on Rails, all objects have a useful blank?
method. It returns true for nil
but also for empty strings or empty arrays. There is also a universal method present?
which returns true
for all values that are not blank?
.
In JavaScript you need to roll your own implementation of blank?
and present?
.
If your application uses [Unpoly](...
How to: Fix json 1.8.3 with Ruby 2.5
The gem json
fails to install for Ruby 2.5 if you use a version equal or below 1.8.3
.
Run bundle update json --conservative
to solve this issue.
The backtrace you will encounter looks like this:
Building native extensions. This could take a while...
ERROR: Error installing json:
ERROR: Failed to build gem native extension.
current directory: /home/user/.rbenv/versions/2.5.3/lib/ruby/gems/2.5.0/gems/json-1.8.3/ext/json/ext/generator
/home/user/.rbenv/versions/2.5.3/bin/ruby -I /home/user/.rbenv/versions/2.5.3/lib/ruby/si...
Bundler: How to install version 1 instead of 2 (latest version)
When installing a gem you can use version comparators like >=
or ~>
. That way it is possible to fetch the latest version of Bundler 1 with this command:
gem install bundler -v '~>1'
How to install bundler for Ruby < 2.3 is a common usecase where you might need Bundler 1.
cucumber_factory: How to keep using Cucumber 2 Transforms in Cucumber 3
Cucumber up to version 2 had a neat feature called Step Argument Transforms which was dropped in favor of Cucumber 3 ParameterTypes. While I strongly encourage you to drop your legacy Transforms when upgrading to Cucumber 3, it might not always be possible due to their different design.
This is a guide on how to keep the exact same functionality of your old Transforms
while writing them in the style of new `Paramet...
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(...
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...
Ruby: Using named groups in Regex
An alternative of using a multiple assignment for a Regex are named groups. Especially when your Regex becomes more complicates it is easier to understand and to process.
Note:
- In case a string does not match the pattern,
.match
will returnnil
. - With Ruby 2.4 the result of
.match
can be transformed to aHash
withnamed_captures
. This allows you to use methods likeslice
orfetch
on the result.
Example with a mult...
Function Composition in Ruby
Along with a number of other cool new features and performance improvements, Ruby 2.6 added function composition to the Proc and Method classes. Today we’ll take a look at how this allows us to use some functional programming goodness in our Ruby code.
Tod: A Gem for handling daytime without a date
Tod is a gem for working with daytimes. That's a tuple of (hour, minute second)
without a day, month or year.
Another additional gem?
Thus SQL has a time
datatype for storing time of day in the format hh:mm:ss
, neither Ruby nor Rails themselves offer an elegant way to deal with day times.
Time
and DateTime
both handle daytime values AND calendar date, using them to only store the time of day will end in inconsistent and thus confusing data, e. g. Time.new
will initialize with the current Time in your Timezone, `DateTime.n...
When reading model columns during class definition, you must handle a missing/empty database
When doing some meta-programming magic and you want to do something for all attributes of a class, you may need to access connection
or some of its methods (e.g. columns
) during class definition.
While everything will be fine while you are working on a project that is in active development, the application will fail to boot when the database is missing or has no tables. This means that Raketasks like db:create
or db:migrate
fail on a freshly cloned project.
The reason is your environment.rb
which is loaded for Raketasks and calls...
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...
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.
Since Roadie is now in passive maintenance mode, we go with premailer:
Include premailer in your Gemfile:
gem 'premailer-ra...
During deployment: "You are trying to install in deployment mode after changing your Gemfile"
While deploying an Ruby update to an old application these days, we encountered the following misleading error:
*** [err :: some-host.makandra.de] You are trying to install in deployment mode after changing
*** [err :: some-host.makandra.de] your Gemfile. Run `bundle install` elsewhere and add the
*** [err :: some-host.makandra.de] updated Gemfile.lock to version control.
*** [err :: some-host.makandra.de]
*** [err :: some-host.makandra.de] You have deleted from the Gemfile:
*** [err :: some-host.makandra.de] *
We found out a newe...
Why you can't use timezone codes like "PST" or "BST" for Time objects
Rails' ActiveSupport::TimeWithZone
objects have both a timezone code and offset, e.g. Thu, 28 Mar 2019 16:00:00 CET +01:00
. Ruby's stdlib TZInfo
also has time zones, but with different identifiers.
Unfortunately, not all timezone codes can be used to parse strings or to move time objects into another time zone.
Some timezone codes like CET
are supported by ActiveSupport extensions like String#in_time_zone
, while many codes will actually not work:
>> '2019-03-01 12:00'.in_time_zone('PST')
ArgumentError (Invalid Timezone: PST)
...
We now have our own memoization gem "Memoized"
We forked trusty memoizer to make two changes:
- Memoized methods now preserve their arity. Previously all memoized methods had an arity of
-1
. - Memoized methods are now faster at runtime. This will only be noticable if you call a memoized methods many times in the same request.
We published our fork as a new gem named memoized.
memoized is API-compatible to memoizer, you just need to include Memoized
instead of `M...
How to install bundler for Ruby < 2.3
Bundler 2 requires at least Ruby 2.3.0 and RubyGems 2.5.0. You might get the following error when you try to install bundler
for Ruby < 2.3:
ERROR: Error installing bundler:
bundler requires Ruby version >= 2.3.0.
To fix this error upgrade your project's ruby version or install the last supported version of Bundler for Ruby < 2.3:
gem install bundler -v '~>1'
You will also see an error if your [RubyGems versi...
RubyGems can't find bundle executable although Bundler is installed
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 asset pipeline: Using ESNext without a transpiler
If your app does not need to support IE11, you can use most ES6 features without a build step. Just deliver your plain JavaScript without transpilation through Babel or TypeScript, and modern browsers will run them natively.
Features supported by all modern browsers include:
- fat arrow functions (
() => { expr }
) -
let
/const
class
-
async
/await
- Promises
- Generators
- Symbols
- Rest arguments (
...args
) - Destructuring
You won't be able to use import
and export
, or use npm modules.
See this [ES6 compatibility mat...
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:
- Update gems as listed below, and bundle
- Boot a Rails console - see below for a list of changes you will probably need
- Run Specs with
--backtrace
option - Run Cucumber features (with Geordi's
--debug
option) - When all tests are green, look through your Gemfile and remove as many version constraints as possible.
- Boot the application in different environements to spot further issues, e...
How to create a Basic Auth header value
When doing Basic Authentication, your browser will send an "Authorization" header. Its value is simply a Base64-encoded representation of "username:password" (like when you place credentials in the URL directly). Example for "user@example.com" with password "secret":
Authorization: Basic dXNlckBleGFtcGxlLmNvbTpzZWNyZXQ=
So, in Ruby, you can create such headers like so:
Base64.strict_encode64("#{username}:#{password}")
Note that when speaking to a REST API, you should be using libraries like RestClient or HTTParty which will wrap ...