Fresh Chrome installations now show a "Choose your search engine" popup in Europe. This might make your Cucumber tests fail.

Fortunately there is a flag to disable the popup. Add the following option to your chromedriver setup code:

options.add_argument('--disable-search-engine-choice-screen')

I found this flag in Peter Beverloo's list.

Background: This was experienced locally with google-chrome 127.0.6533.72. In CI I did not get the popup.

This card is a short summary on different ways of assigning multiple attributes to an instance of a class.

Using positional parameters

Using parameters is the default when assigning attributes. It works good for a small number of attributes, but becomes more difficult to read when using multiple attributes.

Example:

class User
  def initialize(salutation, first_name, last_name, street_and_number, zip_code, city, phone_number, email, newsletter)
    @salutation = salutation
    @first_name = first_name
    @last_name = last_nam...

Using Capistrano, we usually have some array configurations in the config/deploy.rb file, like set :linked_files, %w[config/database.yml], so in this case we don't have to manage the database configuration individually on every server.

In a specific case, one of our projects supports sign in by SAML, but not every deploy target has this feature activated. Here comes a nice handy Capistrano feature, which lets us modify the default configuration for individual env...

I used two lab days to read the The framework field guide - Fundamentals, the first of a three part series to learn the basics of frontend technologies. I can highly suggest it for learning the fundamentals. 'The framework field guide' is written by Unicron Utterances and there side has many high quality articles on web development and computer science related to programming.

[The Framework Field Guide](https://unicorn-ut...

In Rails 7.1 it has become possible to annotate partials with the locals they expect:

# partial _user_name.erb
<%# locals: (user:) %>
<%= user.name %>

# view
<%= render 'user_name' %> <%# this raises an ArgumentError %>

Unfortunately, when some other code in that template raises an ArgumentError (for example an error in the User#name method) you will end up with a confusing stacktrace that looks like you have an error in your render call.

If th...

If you are using the routing-filter gem in your Rails 7.1 app for managing URL segments for locales or suffixes, you will notice that the filters do no longer apply, routes are broken and the necessary parameters are no longer extracted. That is because routing-filter patches Rails' find_routes-method to get the current path and apply its defined filters on it. These filters then modify the params that are handed over to your controller action. This way you receive a locale parameter from a ...

We are using assignable_values for managing enum values in Rails. Nevertheless Rails is adding more support for enum attributes, allowing to have a closer look at the current feature set in comparison to our still preferred option assignable_values.

Active Record enum attribute interface

By default Rails is mapping enum attributes to integers:
...

Why do we migrate?

Due to a change in licensing, we cannot provide Elasticsearch versions >= 8.0.
Version 7.17.x will reach EOL status with the release of Elasticsearch version 9.
We have decided to use OpenSearch as a replacement, since it is a fork of Elasticsearch version 7.10.2, still running under the previous licensing model and wire-compatible.
A more detailed reasoning can be found on their [website](https://opensearch.o...

Note

Using rem only ever makes sense when the root font size is dynamic, i.e. you leave control to the user. Either by a) respecting their user agent defaults, or by b) offering multiple root font sizes in your application.

By defining @media queries in rem, they will accommodate to the root font size of your page. At a larger root font, breakpoints will be at larger widths, scaling with the font. However, there is a catch in case b) mentioned in the note above.

Relative length units in media queries are based on the initial value,...

If you are using git submodules in Gitlab CI, you might run into a "The project you were looking for could not be found or you don't have permission to view it."

Gitlab added a feature that new projects are no longer allowed to be cloned inside CI runs of other repositories by default. To fix this

• Go into the project used as a submodule
• Go to "Settings" -> "CI/CD" (if you don't see this section, enable it in "Settings" -> "General" -> "Visibility, project features, permissions")
• Go to "Token Access"
• Either disable "Limit access to ...

tl;dr

Prefer request specs over end-to-end tests (Capybara) to joyfully test file downloads!

Why?

Testing file downloads via Capybara is not easy and results in slow and fragile tests. We tried different approaches and the best one is just okay.

Tests for file downloads via Capybara ...

• ... are slow,
• ... are fragile (breaks CI, breaks if Selenium driver changes, ...),
• ... need workarounds for your specia...

10.0.0 2024-03-07

Compatible changes

• console command: You can now globally disable the IRB multiline feature by setting irb_flags: --nomultiline in ~/.config/geordi/global.yml. All configured irb_flags are automatically passed on to the console IRB.
• console command: Ctrl + C now properly exits a local Rails console
• rspec and cucumber commands: Run specs even if the automatic chromedriver update fails
• Improve detection of IRB version
• Add new hints to 'Did you know'

Breaking changes

• dump command: Drop...

Rachel Andrew has built a website about CSS Grid.

• Video tutorials
• More than 30 layout examples for feature demonstration
• Layout patterns for copy-paste use
• All grouped by topic: "Placing items onto the grid", "Sizing of tracks and items" etc. with video, linked articles, examples each

You can chain multiple Capybara matchers on the page or any element:

expect(page)
  .to have_content('Example Course')
  .and have_css('.course.active')
  .and have_button('Start')

When you chain multiple matchers using and, [Capybara will retry the entire chain](https://github.com/teamcapybara/capybara/blob/c0cbf4024c1abd48b0c22c2930e7b05af58ab284/lib/capybara/rspec/matc...

I recently built a screen with a very high and wide table in the center. This posed some challenges:

• Giving the table a horizontal scroll bar is very unergonomic, since the scrollbar might be far off screen.
• Making the whole page scrollable looks bad, since I don't want the rest of the UI to scroll.
• Giving the table its own vertical scrollbar and a limited height would have solved it, but felt weird, since the table was 90% of the page.

What I ended up doing is reusing the horizontal page scrollbar (which is naturally fixed at t...

The Web Animations API has great browser support, and you should be using it to animate DOM elements from JavaScript, or to control or wait for CSS animations.

Here is a quick overview of a few useful features:

Animating elements from JavaScript

Use the Element#animate() function to perform animations on an element.

Its API probably a bit different from how your...

I recently noticed a new kind of flaky tests on the slow free tier GitHub Action runners: Integration tests were running on smaller screen sizes than specified in the device metrics. The root cause was the use of Selenium's page.driver.resize_window_to methods, which by design does not block until the resizing process has settled:

We discussed this issue again recent...

Any form fields where users enter numbers should be an <input type="number">.

Numeric inputs have several benefits over <input type="text">:

• On mobile or tablet devices, number fields show a special virtual keyboard that shows mostly digit buttons.
• Decimal values will be formatted using the user's language settings.
  For example, German users will see 1,23 for <input type="number" value="1.23">.
• Values in the JavaScript API or when submitting forms to the server will always use a point as decimal separator (i.e. "1.23" eve...

Sometimes you have a file that is related to a project, while not actually being part of it. You'd like to keep them around, but others won't need them – e.g. some notes, a log, or a database dump.

Sure, you have a project directory – but all of it is tracked by Git. A project's tmp/ directory is usually not tracked, but by definition it is not a good place to keep things.

An excluded directory for related files

I suggest you keep your related files in a related-files/ directory within your project(s).

To keep this directory u...

The linked table shows the support lifecycle for Firefox Extended Support Releases (ESR) which we sometimes need to support for enterprise customers.

The ESR cadence works something like this:

• Firefox ESR freezes the then-current Firefox version for a year.
• During this year Mozilla backports security patches to the current ESR, but does not add features.
• Two subsequent ESR releases overlap for three months. This way enterprises have a quarter to test the new version and migrate their clients.

tl;dr

We recommend configuring Selenium's unhandled prompt behavior to "ignore".

When running tests in a real browser, we use Selenium. Each browser is controlled by a specific driver, e.g. Selenium::WebDriver::Chrome for Chrome.

There is one quirk to all drivers (at least those following the W3C webdriver spec) that can be impractical:
When any user prompt (like an alert) is encountered when trying to perform an action, they will [dismiss the dialog by default](https://w3c....

Your development server is usually running on an insecure HTTP connection which is perfectly fine for development.

If you need your local dev server to be accessible via HTTPS for some reason, you need both a certificate and its key. For a local hostname, you need to create those yourself.
This card explains how to do that and how to make your browser trust the certificate so it does not show warnings for your own certificate.

Easy: self-signed certificate

To just create a certificate for localhost, you can use the following command....

RubyMine has a collaboration feature called "Code With Me". Using it, you can invite someone into your local editor to work together. This is nicer to the eyes and much more powerful than sharing code through some video chat.

How to

Getting started is really simple:

1. Click the "add person" icon in the top-right editor corner (or hit Ctrl + Shift + Y) and select "Start Session".
2. Choose permissions:
   • "Read-only" lets others only watch you.
   • "Edit files" is needed for pairing. Note that this allows remote partners to, well, ...

Getting an entire test suite green can be a tedious task which involves frequent switches between the CLI that is running tests back to the IDE where its cause can be fixed.

The following bash aliases helped me speed up that process:

alias show-next-failure="bundle exec rspec --next-failure"
alias open-next-failure="show-next-failure || show-next-failure --format json  | jq -r '.examples[0]' | jq '\"--line \" + (.line_number|tostring) + \" \" + .file_path' | xargs echo | xargs rubymine"

There is a lot going on above but the gist...