If you want to exclude your staging site from Google using robots.txt without running the risk to forget deleting the file once you go live, name the file robots.exclude.txt instead.

In your Apache Vhost config, rewrite requests for the staging server only:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^staging\.project\.com$
RewriteRule ^robots\.txt$ /robots.exclude.txt

Your robots.exclude.txt looks like this:

# This file is returned for /robots.txt on staging servers
User-agent: *
Disallow: /

**Important ...

Background

Generally, Selenium tests use the browser to interact with the page. If it's unavailable, a timeout error is thrown.

Now, consider a scenario like this:

@javascript
Scenario: Receive an e-mail after clicking the fancy link
  When I follow "fancy link"
  Then I should have an e-mail with the subject "Hello"

When the last step in the scenario passes, you are done. Right? Wrong.

Why it's not enough

What if clicking our "fancy link" above sends the e-mail that we expect, but it also does stuff on the server...

Nested exceptions for Ruby:

When you rescue an error and then re-raise your own, you don't have to lose track of what actually occured, you can keep/nest the old error in your own and the stacktrace will reflect the cause of the original error.

This is awesome when you classes convert exception classes. I now always subclass Nesty::NestedStandardError instead of StandardError for my own error classes.

About Exception#cause

Ruby 2.1 has a built-in mechanism with Exception#cause, which serves a similiar purpos...

Next time you have to do more than trivial CSS changes on a project, you probably want to have live CSS reloading, so every time you safe your css, the browser updates automatically. It's pretty easy to set up and will safe you a lot of time in the long run. It will also instantly reload changes to your html views.

Simply follow the instructions below, taken from blog.55minutes.com.

Install CSS live reload (only once per project)

1. Add th...

Note: While the solution in this card should still work, we prefer another solution now: Hide your Selenium browser window with a VNC server.

If you would like to hide the annoying selenium browser window that always gets the focus and prevents you from working, you can use the headless gem. This note provides some instructions how you can get it to work with your cucumber accepta...

With this command you can initiate an application restart without touching restart.txt. Unlike touching restart.txt, this tool initiates the restart immediately instead of on the next request. http://blog.phusion.nl/2014/01/02/phusion-passenger-4-0-33-released/

If you want to use this with capistrano 2.x just replace the touch command:

-    run "touch #{current_path}/tmp/restart.txt"
+    run "passenger-config restart-app --ignore-app-not-running #{deploy_to}...

In medium-sized to large Rails applications, asset compilation can take several minutes. In order to speed up deployment, asset precompilation can be skipped. This card automates the process.

Capistrano 3

namespace :deploy do
  
  desc 'Automatically skip asset compile if possible'
  task :auto_skip_assets do
    asset_locations = %r(^(Gemfile\.lock|app/assets|lib/assets|vendor/asset))

    revisions = []
    on roles :app do
      within current_path do
        revisions << capture(:cat, 'REVISION').strip
      ...

These steps are now part of Spreewald.

The step definitions below allow you to test the filename suggested by the server:

When I follow "Export as ZIP"
Then I should get a download with the filename "contacts_20110203.zip"

Capybara

Then /^I should get a download with the filename "([^\"]*)"$/ do |filename|
  page.driver.response.headers['Content-Disposition'].should include("filename=\"#{filename}\"")
end

Webrat

Then /...