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...

When Paperclip attachments should only be downloadable for selected users, there are three ways to go.
The same applies to files in Carrierwave.

1. Deliver attachments through Rails

The first way is to store Paperclip attachments not in the default public/system, but in a private path like storage inside the current release. You should prefer this method when dealing with sensitive data.

Make ...

Sometimes files attain executable-flags that they do not need, e.g. when your Windows VM copies them over a Samba share onto your machine.

From inside your Rails project directory call regularly:

geordi remove-executable-flags

Runs chmod -x on Ruby, HTML, CSS, image, Rake and similar files.

This script is part of our geordi gem on github.

When you create e.g. a sidebar box that contains headlines and paragraphs, the final paragraph's margin in that box will create an undesired 'bottom padding' inside that box.

Here is a Sass mixin that you can apply to such boxes. It makes the last child's bottom margin disappear:

=hide_last_margin
  >*:last-child
    margin-bottom: 0

Use it like this:

.sidebar_box
  p, table, ul
    margin-bottom: 1em
  +hide_last_margin

Internet Explorer (fix)

Does not work in versions of <IE8

Your best bet is to expli...

When deploying Rails applications you might have noticed that JS and CSS are not cached by all browsers.

In order to force Apache to add expiry dates to its response, add the attached .htaccess to the public directory. This will add a header such as Expires: Thu, 07 Oct 2010 07:21:45 GMT to the httpd response.

Configuring Apache

Check that you have mod_expires enabled. You need it for the attached .htaccess to work:

sudo a2enmod expires

Configuring Nginx

You can add this:

The following Sass will do it:

hr
  color: #ddd
  background-color: #ddd
  border: none
  height: 1px

When a paperclip attachment gains a new style and you have many attachments, reprocessing can take ages. This is because all styles are being recomputed.

To create only missing images, patch Paperclip like this in your script that does the reprocessing:

Paperclip <2.3.2

class Paperclip::Attachment
  private

  def post_process_styles_with_extreme_lazyness
    @old_styles = @styles

    @styles = @styles.reject do |name, _|
      exists?(name)
    end

    post_process_styles_without_extreme_...

To parse XML-documents, I recommend the gem nokogiri.

A few hints:

• xml = Nokogiri::XML("<list><item>foo</item><item>bar</item></list>") parses an xml string. You can also call Nokogiri::HTML to be more liberal about accepting invalid XML.
• xml / 'list item' returns all matching nodes; list item is used like a CSS selector
• xml / './/list/item' also returns all matching nodes, but .//list/item is now an XPath selector
  • XPath seems to be triggered by a leading ....

log/*
tmp/*
storage/*
db/*.sqlite3
db/schema.rb
db/structure.sql
public/system
.project
.idea/
public/javascripts/all*
public/stylesheets/all*
public/stylesheets/*.css
config/database.yml
*~
*#*
.#*
.DS_Store
webrat-*.html
capybara-*.html
rerun.txt
coverage.data
coverage/*
dump_for_download.dump
.~lock.*
.*.swp
C:\\nppdf32Log\\debuglog.txt