There are many wonderful things about Rails and the Rails ecosystem. A clean, well-lighted path for keeping all your extensions up to date is not one of them.

This is a visualization of the files that will be generated by some useful rails generators. Invoke a generator from command line via rails generate GENERATOR [args] [options]. List all generators (including rails generators) with rails g -h.

On recent/fresh installations of Ruby 1.8.7 you may encounter this error why calling any bundled binary (or just bundle exec):

/home/arne/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.8.7-p374@global/gems/rubygems-bundler-1.4.2/lib/rubygems-bundler/noexec.rb:75:in `setup': undefined method `name' for #<Array:0x7fe04783ef30> (NoMethodError)
  from /home/arne/.rvm/rubies/ruby-1.8.7-p374/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/rubygems/custom_require.rb:29:in `map'
  ...

Apparently, this is due to bundler (or maybe the rubygems-bundler that RVM supplies by default) no lon...

Today, this line made me trouble. Can you spot the mistake?

match 'sitemap.xml' => 'feeds#sitemap', :constraints => { :format => 'xml' }, :as => 'sitemap'

The mistake is to match sitemap.xml. Rails will by default strip any dot-anything, remember it as desired format and forward the rest of the request to the routing engine. Since we're making .xml part of the match, it is not available for format determination and Rails will set the format to html.

Unfortunately, the constraint won't complain in this case and Rails even ren...

1. Install Ruby from the Ubuntu repository: sudo apt-get install ruby ruby-dev \
   ruby is the meta package. If you want to explicitly install 1.8 or 1.9, install ruby1.8 or ruby1.9 instead (the same applies for ruby-dev).
2. Do not install RubyGems from the repository but install the version from the webpage instead.
3. Get Bundler: sudo gem install bundler

Rails and other gems for a project should now be installed via bundle install from the...

If a model inherits from others or uses many concerns / traits, it might be hard to see in the code which validators it has.
But fortunately there's a method for that:

irb(main):002:0> pp UserGroup.validators
[#<ActiveModel::Validations::InclusionValidator:0x00007f55efff97a8
  @attributes=[:deleted],
  @delimiter=[true, false],
  @options={:in=>[true, false], :allow_nil=>false}>,
 #<ActiveModel::Validations::InclusionValidator:0x00007f55f15748d0
  @attributes=[:cancelled],
  @delimiter=[true, false],
  @options={:in=>[true, false], ...

spring ...

The most obvious way to use spring is to call it explicitly:

spring rails console
spring rake db:migrate

Binstubs

Binstubs are wrapper scripts around executables. In Rails they live inside bin/. If you run spring binstub --all, your binstubs will be using Spring.

bin/rails console
bin/rake db:migrate

bundle exec rails ...

Bundle exec is inconsistent when it comes to spring. Some commands will use it, some won't.

bundle exec rails console # starts Spring...

I got this error after upgrading Ruby from 2.4.5 to 2.6.4 when I opened the Rails console - rails server still worked.

Running via Spring preloader in process 14679
Loading development environment (Rails 5.2.2.1)
Traceback (most recent call last):
.../lib/ruby/gems/2.6.0/gems/spring-2.1.0/lib/spring/application.rb:175:in 'fork': No such file to load -- irb/encoding_aliases.rb (LoadError)
.../lib/ruby/gems/2.6.0/gems/spring-2.1.0/lib/spring/application.rb:175:in 'fork': undefined method 'reject!' for nil:NilClass (NoMethodError)
.../li...

Starting with Rails 4.0, when you get an exception reported via the ExceptionNotification gem, you will only see a very short backtrace with all backtrace lines from gems or ruby libraries missing.

This happens, because the ExceptionNotification gem uses Rails' default backtrace cleaner. To get a full backtrace in exception emails, you can remove the comment from this line in config/initializers/backtrace_silencers.rb:

Rails.backtrace_cleaner.remove_silencers!

Note that this will break the "Application Trace" functionality o...

In Rails 3.1+, instead of defining a separate up and down method you can define a single method change:

class AddComparisonFieldsToReport < ActiveRecord::Migration
  def change
    add_column :reports, :compare, :boolean
    update "UPDATE reports SET compare = #{quoted_false}"
    add_column :reports, :compare_start_date, :date
    add_column :reports, :compare_end_date, :date
  end
end

Migrating up works as expected:

b rake db:migrate
==  AddComparisonFieldsToReport: migrating ====================================
-- ad...

When you're using Sidekiq::Web to monitor the Sidekiq status AND have your session cookie configured to a wildcard domain like .example.com, you need to take an additional step to keep your cookies valid.

Issue

Sidekiq::Web is mounted into your Rails application and will use the Rails session cookie for protection from CSRF attacs. While it somehow figures out the cookie name, it does NOT respect cookie configuration like a custo...

To obtain a list of Passenger processes with their application directories and memory usages, you can say

sudo passenger-memory-stats

This will output a list like this:

----- Passenger processes -----
PID    VMSize    Private  Name
-------------------------------
671    112.9 MB  95.5 MB  Rails: /opt/www/project1/current
707    79.4 MB   60.5 MB  Rails: /opt/www/project2/current
1094   88.1 MB   69.3 MB  Rails: /opt/www/project3/current
1260   81.6 MB   62.6 MB  Rails: /opt/www/project4/current
1269   7...

I am talking about development speed. When your application starts growing and you start adding gems, it starts to take really long to start up, be it the server, console or just running a single spec.

Zeus is smart, you don’t have to put it in your Gemfile or run it with Bundler, all you need to do is create a JSON config file via zeus init and then start the server zeus start.

After that, you’re ready to go, all you need to do is prefix every command with zeus. That means rails server becomes zeus server, `rails console...

Use Socket.gethostname. So for a machine whose hostname is "happycat", it will look like this:

>> Socket.gethostname
=> "happycat"

That should work right away for your Rails application. For plain Ruby, you first need to do:

require 'socket'

If you don't want to use Socket for some reason, you can still just use the hostname command, at least on non-Windows machines. Keep in mind that you need to remove trailing white space from the result of the system call.

>> `hostname`
=> "happycat\n"
>> `hostname`.stri...

Add deprecation warnings and their solution or link to available solutions.

Global access to Rake DSL methods is deprecated. Please include Rake::DSL into classes and modules which use the Rake DSL methods.

Open your Rakefile and add the following line above YourApp::Application.load_tasks:

YourApp::Application.class_eval do
  include Rake::DSL
end

Use of ole/file_system is deprecated. Use ole/storage (the file_system api is recommended and enabled by default)...

Upgrading from Ruby 1.8.7 to 2.1.2 took me an hour for a medium-sized application. It involved hardly any changes except

• removing the occasional monkey patch where I had backported functionality from modern Rubies
• Migrating from require to require_relative where I loaded RSpec factories in Cucumber's env.rb (the Rails application root is no longer in the load path by default)
• replacing the old debugger with byebug
• removing sytem_timer from Gemfile (see [this SO thread](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7850216/how-to-inst...

You don't need a Rails application to use Sass. Even when you're working on a static site you can generate your CSS through Sass.

• Install Sass with sudo gem install haml
• Create a folder sass in the folder, that stores your stylesheets, e.g. mkdir css/sass
• In a separate terminal window, run sass --watch css/sass:css. This will watch your sass files for changes and rewrite stylesheets as required.

This even works on Windows.

Note about your .gitignore

You might want to change our [typical .gitignor...

1. Run bundle update cucumber capybara cucumber-rails to update to the newest versions.

2. Backup your features/support/path.rb to be able to add your own paths again after the cucumber installation script in step 4.

3. Backup your features/support/env.rb file to be able to reintegrate parts like your blueprints setup:

   ENV["RAILS_ENV"] ||= "cucumber"
   require File.expand_path(File.dirname(__FILE__) + '/../../config/environment')
   require 'spec/support/blueprints'
   

4. Run `$ rails generate cucumber:install --capyba...

When you load a dump for development, records may reference images that are not available on your machine.

Requests to those images may end up on your application, e.g. if a catch-all route is defined that leads to a controller doing some heavy lifting. On pages with lots of missing images, this slows down development response times.

You can fix that by defining a Rails route like this:

if Rails.env.development?
  scope format: true, constraints: { format: /jpg|png|gif/ } do
    get '/*anything', to: proc { [404, {}, ['']] }

...

Simple: Tell the application controller how to handle exceptions, here a RecordNotFound error.
Do this with the following line:

# application_controller.rb

  rescue_from ActiveRecord::RecordNotFound, :with => :render_404

This will call the method render_404 whenever a RecordNotFound error occurs (you could pass a lambda instead of a symbol, too).
Now write this method:

def render_404
  render 'errors/404', :status => '404'
end

Finally create a 404 document views/errors/errors.html.haml.

%h1 Record...

File logger

If you need to log to a file you can use Ruby's Logger class:

require 'logger'

log = Logger.new('log/mylog.log')
log.info 'Some information'
log.debug 'Debugging hints'
log.error StandardError.new('Something went wrong')

Logger does a number of things well:

• Message type (info / debug / error) is logged
• Log entries are timestamped
• Writing log output is synchronized between threads
• Logged errors are printed with full backtraces

If you don't like the output format, you can define a custom formatter.

I ha...

Last week saw a security issue with rails 2.3 that required a fix. While an official patch was provided, the 2.3 branch is no longer maintained. So we forked it.

(I'm sure there are already 100 other forks doing absolutely the same, but they are not very easily discoverable.)

To use our fork, change the gem "rails"... line in your Gemfile to this:

gem 'rails', :git => 'https://github.com/makandra/rails.git', :branch => '2-3-fixes'

The intent is to make as few changes to the f...