Selenium cannot obtain stable Firefox connection

When using geordi for integration tests you might get the following error when trying to run geordi cucumber:

unable to obtain stable firefox connection in 60 seconds (127.0.0.1:7055) (Selenium::WebDriver::Error::WebDriverError)

This means, that the vnc window the tests is talking to has no proper firefox version running. To figure out the issue this might help you:

  • Check if the .firefox-version (e.g. 24.0) is the same as ~/bin/firefoxes/24.0/firefox says in the browser
  • Maybe [rest...

How to make Webpacker compile once for parallel tests, and only if necessary

Webpack is the future. We're using it in our latest Rails applications.

For tests, we want to compile assets like for production.
For parallel tests, we want to avoid 8 workers compiling the same files at the same time.
When assets did not change, we do not want to spend time compiling them.

Here is our solution for all that.

Its concept should work for all test suites.

Copy the following to config/initializers/webpacker_compile_once.rb. It will patch Webpacker, but only for the test environment:

# Avoid hardcoded asset host...

Caution: Carrierwave has your file three times (temporarily)

When storing a file with Carrierwave, it is always cached prior to actually storing it (to support form roundtrips).

Carrierwave by default 1) copies the file to the cache and then 2) copies it again to its final destination (deleting the cached file immediately after storing). This means there are 3 (three) instances of a file on the disk at some point in time, and still 2 instances after Carrierwave is done if you do not remove...

How to: Rails cache for individual rspec tests

Rails default config uses the ActiveSupport::Cache::NullStore and disables controller caching for all environments except production:

config.action_controller.perform_caching = false
config.cache_store = :null_store

If you want to test caching you have at least two possibilities:

  1. Enable caching for every test (not covered by this card and straightforward)
  2. Enable caching for individual test

Enable caching for individual test (file cache)

1. Leave the defau...

Testing webpages globally (as in "around the globe")

These tools help you in checking websites globally:

DNS Checker

This tool allows for global DNS propagation checking.

GeoScreenshot

This tool takes screenshots of a given URL from various locations across the world.

How to define height of a div as percentage of its variable width

This is useful if, for example, you want to use a background-image that has to scale with the width and the div should only have the height of the picture.

html:

<div class="outer">
  <div class="inner">
  </div>
</div>

css:

.outer {
  width: 100%;
  background-image: image-url('background.png');
  background-size: cover;
}
  
.inner {
  padding-top: 60%;
}

How does it work?

There are several CSS attributes that can handle values as percentage. But they use different other attributes as "reference value...

Webmock normalizes arrays in urls

Typhoeus has a different way of representing array params in a get request than RestClient.

Typhoeus: http://example.com/?foo[0]=1&foo[1]=2&foo[2]=3
RestClient: http://example.com/?foo[]=1&foo[]=2&foo[]=3

Webmock normalizes this url when matching to your stubs, so it is always http://example.com/?foo[]=1&foo[]=2&foo[]=3. This might lead to green tests, but in fact crashes in real world. Rack::Utils.build_nested_query might help to build a get re...

Middleman: Use pretty URLs without doubling requests

By default Middleman generates files with a .html extension. Because of this all your URLs end in /foo.html instead of /foo, which looks a bit old school.

To get prettier URLs, Middleman lets you activate :directory_indexes in config.rb. This makes a directory for each of your pages and puts a single file index.html into it, e.g. /foo/index.html. This lets you access pages with http://domain/foo.

Don't double your requests!

Unfortunately you are now forcing every br...

Middleman configuration for Rails Developers

Middleman is a static page generator that brings many of the goodies that Rails developers are used to.

Out of the box, Middleman brings Haml, Sass, helpers etc. However, it can be configured to do even better. This card is a list of improvement hints for a Rails developer.

Gemfile

Remove tzinfo-data and wdm unless you're on Windows. Add these gems:

gem 'middleman-livereload'
gem 'middleman-sprockets' # Asset pipeline!

gem 'bootstrap-sass' # If you want to use Bootstrap

gem 'byebug'

gem 'capistrano'
gem 'capistrano-mid...

RSpec: Debug flickering test suites with rspec --bisect

In modern default RSpec configurations, your tests are usually run in random order. This helps to detect "flickering" tests that only fail when run in a certain order.

The reason for this are tests that have side effects causing other tests to fail later. The hard part is to find the offending test.

Enter rspec --bisect:

  1. Say you have a flickering test that passes on its own, but you just saw it fail in a full test run. At the top of the RSpec output, you will see a message like Randomized with seed 12345. Take a note of the number....

Rubymine provides a visual merge conflict resolution tool

RubyMine provides a visual tool for resolving merge conflicts locally.

Follow

Git > Resolve Conflicts

in the context menu to open RubyMine's merge conflict tool.

  • Left pane: local copy (read-only)
  • Right pane: checked in version from repository (read-only)
  • Central pane: base revision from which both conflicting versions are derived

You can also use a similar pane view to compare to files.
Mark two files and press Ctrl + D to compare.

How to use Parallel to speed up building the same html partial multiple times (for different data)

The parallel-gem is quite easy to use and can speed up rendering time if you want to render the same partial multiple times (e.g. for rendering long lists of things).
If your parallelized code talks to the database, you should ensure not to leak database connections.

Consider you want to render a list of groups with their members as json. You can use a partial for the rendering of group members, b...

Solved: Element inside overflow:scroll container cannot be scrolled on iOS when dragged by a contained iframe

Imagine the following HTML structure, where the scrolling container has overflow-y: scroll:

+--scrolling container+-+
|                       |
| +-child element+----+ |
| | ++iframe++        | |
| | |        |        | |
| | |        |        | |
+-----------------------+
  | |        |        |   <-- actually cut off by
  | +--------+        |   <-- scrolling container
  +-------------------+

The issue: On iOS, the child element cannot be scrolled when grabbing the iframe (i.e. putting your finger somewhere on the iframe).
...

How to disable Chrome's save password bubble for Selenium tests

When filling out forms in Selenium tests, Chrome shows the (usual) bubble, asking to store those credentials.

While the bubble does not interfere with tests, it is annoying when debugging tests. Here are two ways to disable it:

Option 1: prefs

You can set profile preferences to disable the password manager like so:

prefs = {
  'credentials_enable_service' => false,
  'profile.password_manager_enabled' => false
}

Capybara::Selenium::Driver.new(app, browser: :chrome, prefs: prefs)

Sadly, there are no command line s...

CSS: Don't target multiple vendor-prefixed pseudo-elements in a single rule

Some pseudo-elements need to be addressed with vendor prefixes. E.g. ::selection is not supported by Firefox, you need to use ::-moz-selection instead.

What you cannot do is to define a single CSS rule to address both the standard and vendor-prefixed form:

::selection, ::-moz-selection {
  background-color: red;
}

This rule will be ignored by all browsers. The reason is that if a browser doe...

How to make http/https requests yourself with nc/telnet/openssl

Sometimes you want/have to send specific http(s) requests. You can do that easy with curl or just write the request yourself.

make a http request with nc

nc example.com 80
GET / HTTP/1.1
Host: example.com
# press enter

make a http request with telnet

telnet example.com 80
GET / HTTP/1.1
Host: example.com
# press enter

make https request with openssl

openssl s_client -connect example.com:443
GET / HTTP/1.1
Host: example.com
# press enter

You can specify more headers if you want:

nc example.c...

How to view Image Metadata on the Linux Command Line with ImageMagick

ImageMagick has a command line tool called identify which can read image metadata:

>identify -verbose DSC00136.JPG
Image: DSC00136.JPG
  Format: JPEG (Joint Photographic Experts Group JFIF format)
  Class: DirectClass
  Geometry: 5472x3648+0+0
  Resolution: 350x350
  Print size: 15.6343x10.4229
  Units: PixelsPerInch
  Type: TrueColor
  Endianess: Undefined
  Colorspace: sRGB
  Depth: 8-bit
  Channel depth:
    red: 8-bit
    green: 8-bit
    blue: 8-bit
  Channel statistics:
    Red:
      min: 0 (0)
      max: 255 (1)
      mean: 11...

Vim read-only option

You can start vim with a read-only option. This prevents making accidentally changes in files you don't want to touch.

view /file/to/open

view is actually vim.


Use case

You have opened many similar files and accidentally type :wq in the wrong one. Did you make changes? Which changes you made? When do you notice you edited the wrong file?

Beware: Nested Spreewald patiently blocks are not patient

Note: The behaviour of Spreewald's within step is as described below for version < 1.9.0; For Spreewald >= 1.9.0 it is as described in Solution 1.


When doing integration testing with cucumber and selenium you will often encounter problems with timing - For example if your test runs faster than your application, html elements may not yet be visible when the test looks for them. That's why Spreewald (a collection of cucumber steps) has a concept of doing things patiently, which means a given b...

Haml: Prevent whitespace from being stripped in production

Disclaimer

This is not an issue in newer versions of HAML (starting with 5.0.0), as the ugly-option was removed so that in development everything is rendered ugly, too.

Problem

When HTML is rendered from HAML in production or staging environment, whitespace is removed to reduce the download size of the resulting pages. Therefore it might happen that whitespace you see in development is missing in production or staging.

Here is an example of two inlined bootstrap buttons in a t...

Running external commands with Open3

There are various ways to run external commands from within Ruby, but the most powerful ones are Open3.capture3 and Open3.popen3. Since those can do almost everything you would possibly need in a clean way, I prefer to simply always use them.

Behind the scenes, Open3 actually just uses Ruby's spawn command, but gives you a much better API.

Open3.capture3

Basic usage is

require 'open3'

stdout_str, error_str, status = Open3.capture3('/some/binary', 'with', 'some', 'args')
if status.success?...

CSS font metrics in detail

Line-height and vertical-align are simple CSS properties. So simple that most of us are convinced to fully understand how they work and how to use them. But it’s not. They really are complex, maybe the hardest ones, as they have a major role in the creation of one of the less-known feature of CSS: inline formatting context.

For example, line-height can be set as a length or a unitless value 1, but the default is normal. OK, but what normal is? We often read that it is (or should be) 1, or maybe 1.2, even the CSS spec is unclear on that...

RubyMine: Better soft wraps

Sometimes your code has long lines:

describe 'foo' do
  describe 'bar' do
    really_long_line_really_long_line_really_long_line
    another_line

When you're working with multiple editor panes, such code will often be wider than the pane area:

describe 'foo' do                |
  describe 'bar' do              |
    really_long_line_really_long_|
    another_line                 |

To help with this you can activate Soft wraps in the RubyMine options under General → Editor .

Your code will now look like this:

des...

Bug in Chrome 56+ prevents filling in fields with slashes using selenium-webdriver/Capybara

There seems to be a nasty bug in Chrome 56 when testing with Selenium and Capybara: Slashes are not written to input fields with fill_in. A workaround is to use javascript / jquery to change the contents of an input field.

Use the following code or add the attached file to your features/support/-directory to overwrite fill_in.

module ChromedriverWorkarounds

  def fill_in(locator, options = {})
    text = options[:with].to_s
    if Capybara.current_driver == :selenium && text.include?('/')
      # There is a nasty Bug in Chrome ...