grosser/rspec-instafail

Gem to show failing specs instantly.
Unlike the --fail-fast option it doesn't abort abort on the first failure, but keeps running other examples after print out the failure.

I haven't tried it with parallel_tests.

Preview Github-flavored Markdown from the bash with ianks/octodown

Preview what your markdown would look like on Github. Helpful e.g. when writing or extending a Readme for your gem or projects.

Installation

sudo apt-get install cmake libicu-dev # required for building native extensions
gem install octodown

Know that this will install at least 12 other gems. However, the beautiful output should be worth it.

Usage

octodown README.md

octodown markdown preview

Geordi 1.0 released

Geordi 1.0 features a command line application geordi, that holds most of Geordi's previous commands.

New features

  • command help and usage examples right within geordi (geordi help and geordi help <command>)

  • quick command access: type just the first few letters of a command, e.g. geordi rs or geordi dev[server]

  • command dependencies, e.g. geordi rspec invokes geordi bundle-install (which bundles only if needed)

  • no cluttered /usr/bin, but all commands in one handy tool

  • template for easily adding new...

How to set up database_cleaner for Rails with Cucumber and RSpec

Add gem 'database_cleaner' to your Gemfile. Then:

Cucumber & Rails 3+

# features/support/database_cleaner.rb

DatabaseCleaner.clean_with(:deletion) # clean once, now
DatabaseCleaner.strategy = :transaction
Cucumber::Rails::Database.javascript_strategy = :deletion

Cucumber & Rails 2

The latest available cucumber-rails for Rails 2 automatically uses database_cleaner when cucumber/rails/active_record is required -- but only if transactional fixtures are off. To have database_cleaner work correctly:

  1. Add the at...

Github: How to find the Readme for a certain version of a gem

When a gem author releases a new version to Rubygems, usually a tag with the version number (e.g. v1.2.0) is created an pushed to Github, so everyone can check out or take a look at the source code at this point version release at a later time.

If you'd like to take a look at the Readme of a specific Gem version, you can easily switch to that git tag on Github.

Github: Checkout Git Tag

Refile: Ruby file uploads, take 3

Jonas Nicklas, the author of Carrierwave and Capybara, has released Refile, a gem for handling file uploads in Rails. It handles direct uploads (also direct uploads to Amazon S3) better than Carrierwave.

The story and reasoning behind some of the decisions in Refile, and how it's different from Carrierwave, by the author himself, is a good read before deciding which way you'll go.

Big Caveat: Refile only stores the original image and r...

Installing the typhoeus Rubygem on Ubuntu 14.04

Make sure you have libcurl3-dev installed:

sudo apt-get install libcurl3-dev
gem install typhoeus

How to upgrade Cucumber on Rails 3+

  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...

Taking screenshots in Capybara

Capybara-screenshot can automatically save screenshots and the HTML for failed Capybara tests in Cucumber, RSpec or Minitest.

Requires Capybara-Webkit, Selenium or poltergeist for making screenshots. Screenshots are saved into $APPLICATION_ROOT/tmp/capybara.

Manually saving a page

Additionally you can trigger the same behavior manually from the test using Capybara::Session#save_and_open_page and [...

Traveling Ruby: self-contained, portable Ruby binaries

Traveling Ruby is a project which supplies self-contained, "portable" Ruby binaries: Ruby binaries that can run on any Linux distribution and any OS X machine. This allows Ruby app developers to bundle these binaries with their Ruby app, so that they can distribute a single package to end users, without needing end users to first install Ruby or gems.

Install or update Chromedriver on Linux

Option 0: Download from the official page (preferred)

Chromedriver must be available in your path. You can add ~/bin to your path like this:

echo "export PATH=$PATH:$HOME/bin" >> $HOME/.bash_profile

If you're also using Geordi, disable automatic updating of chromedriver in ~/.config/geordi/global.yml:

a...

jpmcgrath/shortener

Shortener is a Rails Engine Gem that makes it easy to create and interpret shortened URLs on your own domain from within your Rails application. Once installed Shortener will generate, store URLS and “unshorten” shortened URLs for your applications visitors, all whilst collecting basic usage metrics.

Upgrading a Rails 3.2 application to Ruby 2.1 is really easy

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...

Using Passenger Standalone for development

For our production servers we use Passenger as a Ruby application server. While it is possible to use Passenger for development as an Apache module, the installation process is not for the faint of heart.

Luckily Passenger also comes as a standalone binary which requires zero configuration.

You can Passenger Standalone as a replacement for Webrick or Thin if you'd like to:

  • Use SSL certificates locally
  • Get performance behavior that is closer to ...

PSA: Dont allow private gems to be pushed to rubygems.org

If you make a gem with Bundler, you will get a rake release task that will instantly publish your gem to rubygems.org for all the world to admire. For private gems this is very bad.

To make sure this cannot happen, rubygems 2.2+ allows you to restrict eligible push hosts:

Gem::Specification.new 'my_gem', '1.0' do |s|
  # ...
  s.metadata['allowed_push_host'] = 'https://gems.my-company.example'
end

In case you already messed up, [follow these instructions to get your gem removed](http://help.rubygems.org/kb/rubygems/removing-an-a...

Speed up JSON generation with oj

Using this gem I could get JSON generation from a large, nested Ruby hash down from 200ms to 2ms.

Its behavior differs from the default JSON.dump or to_json behavior in that it serializes Ruby symbols as ":symbol", and that it doesn't like an ActiveSupport::HasWithIndifferentAccess.

There are also some issues if you are on Rails < 4.1 and want it to replace #to_json (but you can always just call Oj.dump explicitely).

Security warning: Oj does not escape HTML entities in JSON
---------...

Downgrade Bundler in RVM

Confusingly, RVM installs the bundler gem into the @global gemset, which is available to all gemsets and Rubies.

You can get around this and install a particular bundler version like this:

rvm @global do gem uninstall bundler
rvm @global do gem install bundler -v 1.6.5

New Firefox and gem versions for our Selenium testing environment (Ubuntu 14.04+)

Firefox 5.0.1, which we were using for most Rails 2.3 projects, does not run on Ubuntu 14.04 any more. Here is how to update affected projects.

  1. Update (or create) .firefox-version with the content: 24.0
    If you haven't installed Firefox 24 yet, the next time you run tests with Geordi, it will tell you how to install it.

  2. On a Rails 2 project:

bower-rails can rewrite your relative asset paths

The asset pipeline changes the paths of CSS files during precompilation. This opens a world of pain when CSS files reference images (like jQuery UI) or fonts (like webfont kits from Font Squirrel), since all those url(images/icon.png) will now point to a broken path.

In the past we have been using the vendor/asset-libs folder ...

Angular-xeditable :: Edit in place for AngularJS

Angular-xeditable is a bundle of AngularJS directives that allows you to create editable elements.

Such technique is also known as click-to-edit or edit-in-place.

It is based on ideas of x-editable but was written from scratch to use power of angular and support complex forms / editable grids.

Wrapping Your API In A Custom Ruby Gem

Nice tutorial about packaging Ruby bindings to your API in a Ruby gem, with tests using VCR casettes.

Use a Bash function to alias the rake command to Spring binstubs or "bundle exec" fallback

There are different ways to run rake:

  • On Rails 4.1+ projects, you have Spring and its binstubs which dramatically improve boot-up time for Rake and similar. You need to run bin/rake to use them.
  • On older projects, you want to run "bundle exec rake" to avoid those ugly "already activated rake x.y.z" errors that hit you when different rake versions are installed for your current Ruby.

Here is a solution that gives you a plain rake command which uses a binstubbed bin/rake if available and falls back to bundle exec rake if necessar...

Using rbenv on Ubuntu 18.04+

We will be installing rbenv and ruby-build from our own fork, not from the Ubuntu sources.

Installing rbenv

  1. Install rbenv:

    git clone https://github.com/rbenv/rbenv.git ~/.rbenv
    

    For Bash:

    echo 'export PATH="$HOME/.rbenv/bin:$PATH"' >> ~/.bashrc
    echo 'eval "$(rbenv init -)"' >> ~/.bashrc
    

    For ZSH:

    echo 'export PATH="$HOME/.rbenv/bin:$PATH"' >> ~/.zshrc
    echo 'eval "$(rbenv init -)"' >> ~/.zshrc
    

    Now reinitialize ...

Ubuntu: Fix "An error occurred while installing pg"

If you get an error like this:

An error occurred while installing pg (0.17.1), and Bundler cannot continue.
Make sure that gem install pg -v '0.17.1' succeeds before bundling.

Then do this:

sudo apt-get install libpq-dev

... and run Bundler again.