Rake tasks in lib/tasks are ignored when the filename ends in .rb; Rails and Rake load them only from .rake files.

Check a hostname’s current IP address and DNS records against name servers worldwide to verify DNS propagation after zone changes.

curl still prints progress information when the response body is redirected; --silent suppresses all output for background jobs and scripts.

Send an HTTP 1.1 request to a specific machine while presenting a different host name, using curl --resolve or a manual Host header.

Run JavaScript from Ruby without choosing a runtime manually; ExecJS automatically selects an available engine and returns results as Ruby objects.

Newer rake versions can break craken:install with a "can't convert Hash into String" error during deployments.

gpg backups can fail in cron jobs when they try to access /dev/tty, leaving empty backup files. Enabling --no-tty avoids the terminal prompt error.

Solr update requests can fail with 500 errors when a stale Lucene write lock remains in the data directory, often from incorrect file ownership.

Advanced git commands and lesser-known workflows can speed up common tasks and reduce mistakes for experienced users.

Wrap long terminal text at a fixed width with fold, echoing pasted input or writing wrapped output to a file.

Open the file manager directly in the current terminal folder with nautilus . instead of navigating there manually.

Dragging files from Nautilus into a terminal inserts their full paths, including multiple files, without typing them manually.

Generate visual state diagrams for models using state_machine with a rake task and Graphviz, producing PNG output for quick inspection.

autossh can fail with “Address already in use” when the tunnel port or monitoring ports are occupied by another process.

Custom exception classes in Ruby can be defined with Class.new(StandardError) and referenced as namespaced constants.

Firefox updates can break Selenium and Cucumber tests; a separate unchanging browser copy avoids auto-updates, profile clashes, and window reuse.

Capistrano deployments to multiple servers can fail when each host needs a different login; putting the username in the server definition avoids a global set :user setting.

Build a Regexp from existing Regexp objects with interpolation, but backreferences like \1 can point to the wrong capture group after concatenation.

Selenium on WEBrick fails on HTTPS pages because the server does not speak SSL. Disabling SSL only for those scenarios avoids Cucumber browser test failures.

Custom empty? on a has_many model can break Machinist collection building, creating records with the wrong foreign key. Use explicit association assignment instead.

Selecting a dropdown value without knowing the available options helps in tests where only a valid choice is needed. Capybara can read an option from the list and select it by text.

Rails 3 dbconsole misreads -p test and opens the development database unless the environment is passed first.

Time Machine local backups can be encrypted by using an encrypted external volume instead of a disk image. Sparsebundle images are not recognized for local drives.

Run multiple Internet Explorer versions in separate VirtualBox VMs on Linux or OS X for website testing without Microsoft VirtualPC.