Consul 0.6.1+ gives your Power class a number of static methods that behave neutrally in case Power.current is nil. This allows you to create authorization-aware models that still work when there is no user at the end of a web browser, e.g. on the console, during tests or during batch processes.

You will often want to access Power.current from another model, to e.g. iterate through the list of accessible users:

class UserReport

  def data
    Power.current.users.c...

Update RubyGems and Passenger

Bundler requires Rubygems >= 1.3.6. Run gem update --system if you have an older version.
It also is not compatible with older versions of passenger, so bring that up to date as well (2.2.15 works).

If you installed RubyGems through apt (which you should never do!), you may see a message giving you a hint to use apt to update.
Some people advise to install the 'rubygems-update-1.3.7' gem on Ubuntu systems if you used apt to install RubyGems.
I did that - and lost all...

When we want to use our own (or bought) fonts in an application with Webpack(er), we have two options. We can

• put the fonts directly into your Webpack's assets folder or
• write an npm package with an own sass file that can be imported from the Webpack manifest.

Load fonts from your assets folder

The first option turns out to be straightforward: Import the stylesheets in the index.js of the pack you're using:

// webpack_source_path/application/index.js

import './stylesheets/reset'
import...

MongoMapper is a MongoDB adapter for Ruby. We've forked it so it works for Rails 2.3.x applications running on Ruby 1.9. [1]

makandra/mongomapper is based on the "official" rails2 branch [2] which contains commits that were added after 0.8.6 was released. Tests are fully passing on our fork for Ruby 1.8.7, REE, and Ruby 1.9.3.

To use it, add this to your Gemfile:

gem 'mongo_mapper', :git => 'git://github.com/makandra/mongomapper.git', :branch => 'rails2'

...

SitePrism gives you a simple, clean and semantic DSL for describing your site using the Page Object Model pattern, for use with Capybara in automated acceptance testing.

The Page Object Model is a test automation pattern that aims to create an abstraction of your site's user interface that can be used in tests. The most common way to do this is to model each page as a class, and to then use instances of those classes in your tests.

If a class represents a page then each element of the page is represented by a method that, when cal...

The pages […] allow you to see different types of mixed content and test how they behave in your browser. The "Secure" pages are referencing assets with HTTPS, the "Non-Secure" pages are referencing them with HTTP. Generally, you'll observe the same behavior with both Secure pages and the Secure HTTP page for a given test; the behavior will change on the Non-Secure HTTPS page.

Also see Testing HTTPS with badssl.com.

In a nutshell:

If you require your Rails models manually, pay attention to the path you use. Unless you have to, don't do it at all.

Background

Consider these classes:

# app/models/user.rb

class User < ActiveRecord::Base
  validate :magic

  def magic
    errors.add_to_base('failed') if bad_things?
  end
end

^
# app/models/foo.rb

require 'user'

class Foo
  # something happens here
end

Now, when your environment is booted, Rails will automatically load your models, like User...

In cucumber you are able to run features in whatever directory you like. This also includes executing features in subdirectories. There are only some things you have to take care of.

By default, cucumber loads all *.rb files it can find (recursively) within the directory you passed as argument to cucumber.

$ cucumber # defaults to directory "features"
$ cucumber features
$ cucumber my/custom/features/dir

So, if you would like to organize features in subdirectories, you won't have *any problems when running the whole test...

After installing Bundler 1.1 you will get the following warning when running tests:

WARNING: Cucumber-rails required outside of env.rb. The rest of loading is being defered until env.rb is called.\
To avoid this warning, move 'gem cucumber-rails' under only group :test in your Gemfile

The warning is misleading because it has nothing to do with moving cucumber-rails into a :test group. Instead you need to change your Gemfile to say:

gem 'cucumber-rails', :require => false

• When your site is on HTTPS and you are linking or redirecting to a HTTP site, the browser will not send a referrer.
• This means the target site will see your traffic as "direct traffic", i.e. they cannot distinguish such hits from a user who directly typed in the URL.

Reasons for this behavior

It's probably because of this RFC:

Clients SHOULD NOT include a Referer header field in a (non-secure) HTTP request if the referring page was transferr...

Travis CI is a free continuous integration testing service. However, it is really fragile and will break more than it will work.

If you choose to use it anyway, learn the lessons we already learnt:

Use a compatible Rubygems for Rails 2.3 on Ruby 1.8.7

Ruby 1.8.7 is not compatible with current Rubygems versions (> 2.0). Runnig rvm rubygems latest-1.8 --force will fix this and install Rubygems version 1.8.29.

To make Travis CI do this, add `before_script: rvm rubygems latest-1....

Travis changed their default distribution from Ubuntu 14.04 (trusty) to 16.04 (precise). This might break your test setup for new builds.

You can solve this issue by freezing your test distribution in the .travis.yml to Ubuntu 14.04 until you have the time to solve all the issues you will have in 16.04:

dist: trusty

Error details

Here are few indicators that you ran into this issue:

Connection to the PostgreSQL database does not work anymore

Your travis-ci builds might have started failing on the usual

psql -c...

General hints on the DOM

• the root of the DOM is document
• custom elements inherit from HTMLElement. They need a - (dash) in their name, e.g. <notification-box>.
• event listeners don't have event delegation à la .on('click', cssSelector, handler)

Comparison

This error occurs when you already have a database.yml which defines the database for the cucumber environment instead of test. (Spreewald database.sample.yml has changed)

Fix

Change cucumber to test in your databse.yml

test:    # <---
  adapter: mysql2
  database: spreewald_test
  encoding: utf8
  host: localhost
  username: root
  password: password

Capybara uses www.example.com as the default hostname when making requests.
If your application does something specific on certain hostnames and you want to test this in a feature, you need to tell Capybara to assume a different host.

Given /^our host is "([^\"]+)"$/ do |host|
  page.config.stub app_host: "http://#{host}"
  
  # In older Capybaras (< 2.15) you needed to do this instead:
  Capybara.stub app_host: "http://#{host}"
end

You can now say:

When I go to the start page
Then I should not see "Home ...

When you're writing specs for ActiveRecord models that use memoization, a simple #reload will not do:

it 'updates on changes' do
  subject.seat_counts = [5]
  subject.seat_total.should == 5
  # seat_total is either memoized itself, or using some
  # private memoized method
  
  subject.seat_counts = [5, 1]
  subject.seat_total.reload.should == 6 # => Still 5
end

You might be tempted to manually unmemoize any memoized internal method to get #seat_total to update, but that has two disadvant...

When using Savon to connect a SOAP API, you may want to use Savon::SpecHelper to mock requests in your tests as described in their documentation.

When sending a message body, the savon mock object requires a message to be set, like this:

savon.expects(:action_name).with(message: { user_id: 123 }).returns('<some xml>')

If you want to stub only the returned XML and do not care about request arguments, you can not omit with as Savon's helper will complain:

savo...

Our rspec_candy gem now gives you three matchers:

be_same_number_as

Tests if the given number is the "same" as the receiving number, regardless of whether you're comparing Fixnums (integers), Floats and BigDecimals:

100.should be_same_number_as(100.0)
50.4.should be_same_number_as(BigDecimal('50.4'))

Note that "same" means "same for your purposes". Internally the matcher compares normalized results of #to_s.

be_same_second_as

...

The following snippet demonstrates how you could create excel files (with spreadsheet gem) and format columns so that they follow a specific number format like currencies or dates do.

require 'rubygems'
require 'spreadsheet'

Spreadsheet.client_encoding = 'UTF-8'

book = Spreadsheet::Workbook.new
sheet1 = book.create_worksheet :name => 'test'

money_format = Spreadsheet::Format.new :number_format => "#,##0.00 [$€-407]"
date_format = Spreadsheet::Format.new :num...

For two years we've been using SearchableTrait which gives models the ability to process Googlesque queries like this:

Contact.search('a mix of words "and phrases" and qualified:fields')

This trait used to be a huge blob of code without tests and documentation, so I made a gem out of it. Check out https://github.com/makandra/dusen for code, tests, and a huge README.

You should use the Dusen gem and delete SearchableTrait in all future projects.

Note that the syntax to define query proc...

If your requests blow up in Ruby or CURL, the server you're connecting to might only support requests with older SSL/TLS versions.

You might get an error like: OpenSSL::SSL::SSLError: SSL_connect SYSCALL returned=5 errno=0 state=unknown state

SSL Server Test

This SSL Server Test can help finding out which SSL/TLS versions the server can handle.

Ruby

In Ruby, you can teach Net::HTTP to use a specific SSL/TLS version.

uri = URI.parse(url)

ssl_options = {
   use_ssl: true,
   ssl_version...

When you have a multi-server setup, you'll be adding a new server from time to time. Before doing a full deploy, you might want to test that server in an isolated deploy. There is a single way to do this: the HOSTFILTER env variable.

Commenting out "server" lines in the Capistrano deploy config will raise a Capistrano::NoMatchingServersError with <task> is only run for servers matching {:roles=> <role>}, but no servers matched. Instead, specify the server-under-test like this:

HOSTFILTER=separate-sidekiq.makandra.de cap productio...

For the initial setup or changes in the sentry reporting it might be useful to enabled reporting of sentry in development. Don't commit these changes and prefer to report to the staging environment. As other developers might be confused of these errors try to given them a proper message and delete them afterwards.

1. Add config.raven_dsn = 'your-dns' in config/environments/development.rb.
2. Add development to existing environments in the Raven.configure block: config.environments = ['development', 'staging', 'production'].
3. ...