After having written useful scripts into makandra notes for a long time, we’ve now tied them into a powerful new gem: geordi.

It gives you the power to

• get a dump from your production database with dump-for production
• install your local gems to the production machine with install-gems-remotely
• execute rake tasks to several environments at the same time with power-rake db:migrate
• and much more

Check it out from github.

Since May 2011 we are cutting new gems using Bundler, which is less painful than cutting gems using Jeweler. You know a gem was cut using Bundler if you see the word Bundler in a gem project's Rakefile.

This is how to update a gem that was cut using Bundler:

• Say git pull or check out a repository from Github like git clone git@github.com:makandra/geordi.git
• Update the gem version in `lib/project...

We regularly need to connect to the server in order to e.g. access the production console. Guessing the Capistrano deploy user and then again guessing the right directory on the server is awkward, so we wrote a script that parses config/deploy and gives you the handy command shell-for.

Run it from any project directory like this, passing a Capistrano multistage deployment target:

shell-for staging

Now it also supports commands to be remotely executed before loading the bash. Use --no-bash to only execute the command and load no ba...

Run rspec-and-cucumber from any project directory to run both RSpec and Cucumber. If available, rspec_spinner or cucumber_spinner are used.

Note that features are not run when specs fail.\
If you prefer to run them in parallel or run features regardless of the spec results, please adjust it for yourself accordingly.

This script is part of our geordi gem on github.

Make sure you understand differences between git's areas (such as stash, workspace, upstream, etc.) and what commands affect which areas.

Whenever is a Ruby gem that provides a clear syntax for writing and deploying cron jobs.

We often have a separate production branch that lags a bit behind the more cutting edge main branch. Sometimes you want to move some, but not all commits from main to production. This can be done with a git cherry-pick.

However, this may lead to considerable pain later, since git does not understand the commits are actually "the same". Hazards are unnecessary and hard to resolve conflicts as well as incorrect auto-merges.

In order to avoid this, always merge the production branch back to the main after the cherry-pick. Even t...

You can seriously speed up deployments with Capistrano when using a local git repository on the server you are deploying to.

Simply add

set :deploy_via, :remote_cache
set :copy_exclude, [ '.git' ]

to your config/deploy.rb and Capistrano will create a clone in shared/cached-copy. This will be updated using git pull when deploying which transfers less bytes and is usually much faster. If deploy_via is set to use default settings (being "export"), Capistrano will do a full clone of the repository from your git host otherwi...

Airbrake (formerly Hoptoad) already ignores certain errors like InvalidAuthenticityToken by default (see Airbrake::Configuration::IGNORE_DEFAULT).\
To ignore additional classes of errors, put this into config/initializer/airbrake.rb:

Airbrake.configure do |config|
  config.ignore << 'ActiveRecord::IgnoreThisError'
end

You probably also want to ignore ActionController::MethodNotAllowed and ActionController::UnknownHttpMethod exceptions.

See the github page for more options on h...

To display a list of your current Git remotes and their endpoints, you can say

git remote -v

The output looks like this:

brady8	https://github.com/brady8/aegis.git (fetch)
brady8	https://github.com/brady8/aegis.git (push)
origin	git@github.com:makandra/aegis.git (fetch)
origin	git@github.com:makandra/aegis.git (push)

If you want to convert a README.rdoc file to HTML, say this from a shell:

rdoc README.rdoc

You will find the generated HTML in doc/index.html.

If you do this while working on one of our gems, please .gitignore everything in doc and don't commit the generated HTML.

One of the thornier problems in our workflow is knowing when assets are delivered from the designer and keeping them in sync with our application as they change. We used to use e-mail, Skype or sticky notes. The trouble is that the designer's file naming and directory structure were never quite the same as the application's /public/images directory, so direct comparisons were impossible and we ended with a lot bookkeeping to make sure that we didn't lose any changes. Our solution is to clone the project's git repository into a folder inside ...

blueprint is DevStructure’s workhorse tool that looks inside popular package managers, finds changes you made to configuration files, and archives software you built from source to generate Puppet, Chef, or shell code.  Everything blueprint sees is stored in Git to be diffed and pushed.  It runs on Ubuntu Linux 10.04 and newer.

Specify these gem versions in your Gemfile:

gem 'cucumber', '~> 1.3.0'
gem 'cucumber-rails', '= 0.3.2' # max version for Rails 2
gem 'capybara', '< 2' # capybara 2+ requires Rails 3
gem 'mime-types', '< 2' # dependeny of capybara
gem 'nokogiri', '< 1.6' # dependency of capybara
gem 'rubyzip', '< 1' # dependency of selenium-webdriver, rubyzip 1+ requires Ruby 1.9
gem 'cucumber_factory'
gem 'database_cleaner', '< 1'
gem 'cucumber_spinner', '~> 0.2.5'
gem 'launchy', '~> 2.1.2'

With these versions set, `...

Merging .po-files with Git is painful.

There have been attempts of making Git more clever when trying to merge .po-files. I believe however that this is not enough as it can still produce invalid .pos (usually due to double definitions), which can seriously confuse gettext afterwards.

Lacking any more secure solution, I think you should avoid editing po files in different branches at the same time. In order to not accidentally produce invalid merges I additionally ...

The shell variable PS1 holds your bash prompt. You might want to change it to serve your needs best. Here is how to:

General

• non-printing escape sequences in your prompt have to be inclosed in \[\e[ and \] so your shell can correctly count its prompt's length
• we recommend to highlight your prompt on production machines
• you can also [show different root prompts for each user](https://makandracards.com/makandra/9569-get-the-username-w...

Adds a slide out panel to your Rails application that directs clients to test stories that have been marked as 'delivered' in Pivotal Tracker.

This tool is used on our application servers (and called when deploying) but it also works locally.
Just call dumple development from your project directory to dump your database.

This script is part of our geordi gem on github.

When you try to remove a non-existing index using remove_index, the migration will incorrectly pass without an error. The schema will not be changed, but the migration will be considered migrated.

Since this might be fixed in the future, you cannot mend your database by adding another migration on top of the faulty one. You should manually alter the database schema to the previous migration on all machines that migrated the faulty migration (inform your fellow developers), then delete the faulty migration from the repository.

jQuery plugin to register callback functions to keyboard shortkuts. Keyboard events in vanilla Javascripts are super-painful to work with, so hopefully this library can help.

Call geordi clean from a project root to remove unused and unnecessary files inside it.

This script is part of our geordi gem on github. In Geordi > 1.2 you can call geordi clean.

Git allows you to do a binary search across commits to hunt down the commit that introduced a bug.

Given you are currently on your branch's HEAD that is not working as expected, an example workflow could be:

git bisect start # Start bisecting
git bisect bad # Tag the revision you are currently on (HEAD) as bad. You could also pass a commit's SHA1 like below:
git bisect good abcdef12345678 # Give the SHA1 of any commit that was working as it should
# shorthand:
git bisect start <bad ref> <good ref>

Git will fetch a comm...

If you need to find out which of your local commits are not on the remote server do this:

git cherry -v

The -v option prints out the commit messages. Without it you will see only the SHA1 codes.

You may also compare against another (upstream) branch like that:

git cherry -v origin/somebranch

This tool is especially useful when you have a ton of commits after a merge and want to know the commit differences between branches.

The ‘merge.*.driver` variable’s value is used to construct a command to run to merge ancestor’s version, current version and the other branches’ version. The merge driver is expected to leave the result of the merge in the file named with %A by overwriting it, and exit with zero status if it managed to merge them cleanly, or non-zero if there were conflicts.