This blew my mind today:

• 12 Little-Known CSS Facts
• 12 Little-Known CSS Facts (The Sequel)

Please make sure to check browser support for CSS features on Can I Use and the Mozilla Development Network before using.

Favorites

• outline-offset: specify how far away from the element an outline is rendered
• ::first-letter: matches the first letter insid...

Large projects usually have large test suites that can run for a long time.
This can be annoying as running tests blocks you from picking up the next story -- but it doesn't have to be that way!

Simply clone your project's repo twice (or even more often).

When your work on a feature branch is done, simply push that branch and check it out on your 2nd copy to run tests there.
You can pick up a new story and work on that on your "main" project directory.

If you do it right, you will even be able to run tests in both your 2nd copy and your m...

In most of our applications, users have their first and last name stored in separate columns. However, specifying them separately quickly gets annoying, especially when proxying them from cucumber_factory:

Given there is a user with the first name "Dominik" and the last name "Schöler"

Wouldn't it be nice if you could just say:

Given there is a user with the name "Dominik Schöler"

and have FactoryGirl assign first and last name automatically? The code below achieves that!

##...

If you need to follow links, click buttons, etc. using Capybara inside an <iframe>, you can do it like this:

page.within_frame('iframe-id') do
  fill_in 'E-mail', with: 'foo@bar.com'
  fill_in 'Password', with: 'secret'
  click_button 'Submit'
end

Instead of the frame's [id] attribute you may also pass a Capybara::Node for an <iframe>.

If you're also using Cucumber you could make a meta-step like this:

When /^(.*?) inside the (.*?) frame$/ do |step_text, frame_id|
  page.within_frame(frame_id) do
    s...

Capistrano 3 is a major rework of the framework and requires several adjustments to your deploy configuration files. The biggest change is that they moved away from their custom DSL and use Rake instead. For connecting with and operating on the servers, they bring a new gem SSHKit which does the heavy lifting. It's SSHKit's DSL that is used anywhere inside the Rake tasks. See #Resources at the bottom for examples.

Step 1: Upgrade guide

For migration from 2 to 3, follow this tutorial: [Capistrano 3 Upgrade Guide](https://semaphorec...

If you have FactoryGirl traits like this:

factory :movie do

  title 'Sunshine'
  year 2007
  
  trait :vintage do
    year 1951
  end
  
  trait :moody do
    title 'Interstellar'
  end

end

You can now call them from Cucumber Factory like this:

Given there is a movie (vintage, moody)

Please don't use the horrible datetime_select helper. It has a terrible UI. Always prefer to use a visual time picker like Rome instead.

In case everything has failed and you do need a Cucumber step to pick a datetime datetime_select, here it is:

When(/^I select the time (\d+)\-(\d+)\-(\d+) (\d+):(\d+) from "(.*?)"$/) do |year, month, day, hour, minute, label_text|
  label = page.find('label', text: label_text)
  id = label[...

You might wonder about this request in your test.log:

Started GET "/__identify__" for 127.0.0.1 at 2015-04-29 18:00:02 +0100

This is what happens: For drivers like Selenium, Capybara will boot up a Thin or Webrick server in a separate thread. It then makes a GET request to /__identify__ to see if the server is ready to accept requests.

Since you don't have a route that responds to /__identify, Capybara will wrap your Rails app in...

jquery-placeholder is a simple jQuery plugin that enables form placeholders in browsers that do not support them natively, i.e. IE < 10.

Properties

• Works in IE6.
• Automatically checks whether the browser natively supports the HTML5 placeholder attribute for input and textarea elements. If this is the case, the plugin won’t do anything. If @placeholder is only supported for input elements, the plugin will leave those alone and apply to textareas exclusively. (This is the case for Safari 4, Opera 11.00, and possibly other browsers.)
  ...

If you want to grow a Ruby Array, you might find out about #fill but it is not really what you are looking for. [1]
For arrays of unknown size that you want to grow or shrink to a fixed size, you need to define something yourself. Like the following.

Array.class_eval do

  def in_size(expected_size, fill_with = nil)
    sized = self[0, expected_size]
    sized << fill_with while sized.size < expected_size
    sized
  end

end

Use it like this:

>> [1, 2, 3].in_size(5)
=> [1, 2, 3, nil, nil]

...

Code folding is a very useful feature to me. It gives me a quick overview over a file and keeps me from scolling like a hamster in its wheel.

Keyboard shortcuts:

Collapse/expand current code block

strg -/+

Collapse/expand the whole file

strg ctrl -/+

When diving into Cucumber features or huge Ruby classes, I usually collapse all and the gradually expand what I need.

This cheat sheet ... aims at providing a quick reference to
the most commonly used features in AngularJS.

When ending a Selenium test Capybara resets the browser state by closing the tab, clearing cookies, localStorage, etc.

It may be a good idea to wait for all in-flight AJAX requests to finish before ending a scenario:

• You may have client-side JavaScript that freaks out when the tab closure kills their pending requests. If that JavaScript opens an error alert or spams errors to the console, your test may fail after the last step.
• With unlucky timing the server may receive an AJAX request as the browser tab closes, causing a connection ...

Here's a pretty useful steps that hasn't made it into Spreewald yet.

It is best used with the auto-mapper for BEM classes in features/support/selectors.rb

When I hover above [selector] element

When /^I hover above (.*) element$/ do |selector|
  page.find(selector_for(selector)).hover
end

Example:

When I hover above the album's image element

→ triggers a hover event on .album--image

Good article about window functions. Also note how they use a postgres feature called common table expressions.

When you are using the #selector_for helper in Cucumber steps, as e.g. Spreewald does, the following snippet will save you typing. It recognizes a prose BEM-style selector and maps it to the corresponding BEM class.

For a variation on this idea, see An auto-mapper for ARIA labels and BEM classes in Cucumber selectors.

Examples

"the main menu" -> '.main-menu'
"the item box's header" -> '.item-box--header'

Here are some examples of steps (using Spreewald, too):

T...

I got the following error after updating the selenium-webdriver gem:

wrong number of arguments (0 for 1) (ArgumentError)
/home/pointoo-dev/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.8.7-p374/gems/selenium-webdriver-2.35.1/lib/selenium/webdriver/common/platform.rb:183:in `open'
/home/pointoo-dev/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.8.7-p374/gems/selenium-webdriver-2.35.1/lib/selenium/webdriver/common/platform.rb:183:in `ip'
/home/pointoo-dev/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.8.7-p374/gems/selenium-webdriver-2.35.1/lib/selenium/webdriver/common/platform.rb:196:in `interfaces'

It was caused...

When running migrations with rake db:migrate, there's the STEP and VERSION parameters that you can pass to nearly all commands.

# Migrate
rake db:migrate
rake db:migrate STEP=2
rake db:migrate VERSION=20080906120000

# Redo
rake db:migrate:redo
rake db:migrate:redo STEP=2
rake db:migrate:redo VERSION=20080906120000

# Rollback (starting from latest migration)
rake db:rollback
rake db:rollback STEP=2

# Run the `down` migration path of a certain migration file
rake db:migrate:down VERSION=20080906120000

I've pushed an update to Cucumber factory that simplifies working with FactoryGirl factories.

Say you define a factory with the class: option:

factory :admin, class: User
  email
  admin true
end

In the past, you had to write

Given there is a user (admin)

Now you can simply write

Given there is an admin

The class is inferred from the factory.

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...

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...

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...