OCRA (One-Click Ruby Application) builds Windows executables from Ruby source code. The executable is a self-extracting, self-running executable that contains the Ruby interpreter, your source code and any additionally needed ruby libraries or DLL.

ocra [option] script.rb

Will package “script.rb“, the Ruby interpreter and all dependencies (gems and DLLs) into an executable named “script.exe“.

DTAUS & DTAZV are formats for German bank transfers and is short for "Datenträgeraustausch". The format itself totally sucks because it was established in the last century, to be used on floppy disks. Still almost all German banks use it (they only seem innovative at robbing), and it is therefore supported in common banking programs too.

This gem saves you all the trouble when generating DTAUS- or DTAZV-text.

In order to navigate through the browser history. you can manipulate the window.history object via javascript like follows:

When /^I go back in the browser history$/ do
  page.evaluate_script('window.history.back()')
end 

For further functions of the window and history objects check out this link.

An improved version of this step is now part of our gem spreewald on Github.

All our projects have enum-like requirements like this:

• An attribute value must be included in a given set of values.
• The list of allowed values must be retrievable in order to render <select> boxes.
• Each value has a humanized label.
• Sometimes there is a default value.

Most of the time, this requirement is also needed:

• The list of assignable values depends on the user who is currently signed in.

In our past projects there are many different solutions for these related requirements, e.g. ChoiceTrait, methods like `available_...

This is for you if Passenger gives you the following useless error message.

Passenger encountered the following error:\
The application spawner server exited unexpectedly: Unexpected end-of-file detected.

Exception class:

PhusionPassenger::Rack::ApplicationSpawner::Error

Most often this happens because you are missing a gem. Usually Passenger would tell you about that but in some cases it can't.

To resolve this issue, run:

bundle install

If this does not do the trick for you, take a look at the Apache log files for de...

If you cannot install the gem 'RedCloth' via bundle install you might want to try the following.

Specifying extra build options for bundler which will only be applied when building RedCloth:

bundle config build.RedCloth --with-cflags=-w

Geordi, our collection of command line tools, has been extended by another command deploy-to-production. This script encapsulates the following workflow:

• Pull the production branch.
• Show which commits from the master would make it to production with this deploy.
• Ask if you want to proceed.
• If yes, merge the master into the production branch, push and deploy with bundle exec cap production deploy:migrations

The script will ask you for the names of your master branch, production branch an...

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

After you configured your ODBC describe in

• Fix [RubyODBC]Cannot allocate SQLHENV when connecting to MSSQL 2005 with Ruby 1.8.7. on Ubuntu 10.10
• and Connecting to MSSQL with Ruby on Ubuntu - lambie.org

you can connect with sequel:

require "rubygems"
require "se...

I followed this nice guide Connecting to MSSQL with Ruby on Ubuntu - lambie.org until I ran in the following errors:

irb(main):001:0> require "dbi"; dbh = DBI.connect('dbi:ODBC:MyLegacyServer', 'my_name', 'my_password')

DBI::DatabaseError: INTERN (0) [RubyODBC]Cannot allocate SQLHENV
  from /usr/lib/ruby/1.8/dbd/odbc/driver.rb:36:in `connect'
  from /usr/lib/ruby/1.8/dbi/handles/driver.rb:33:in `connect'
  from /usr/lib/ruby...

Bundler 1.1 has been released. With this version you no longer need to wait for this:

Fetching source index…

The new Bundler is smarter and can fetch required metadata in a few seconds.

You can install the new version by saying:

sudo gem install bundler

If you get this:

Installing typhoeus (0.3.3) with native extensions
/usr/local/lib/site_ruby/1.8/rubygems/installer.rb:483:in `build_extensions': ERROR: Failed to build gem native extension. (Gem::Installer::ExtensionBuildError)

/usr/bin/ruby1.8 extconf.rb 
checking for curl/curl.h in /opt/local/include,/opt/local/include/curl,/usr/include/curl,/usr/include,/usr/include/curl,/usr/local/include/curl... no
need libcurl

You can fix it by installing the libcurl3-dev package:

sudo apt-get install libcurl3-dev

Now you should...

1. Your current ruby must be Ruby Enterprise.
2. gem install passenger
3. passenger-install-apache2-module
4. Edit your httpd.conf according to the instructions provided at the end of the setup script.
5. Restart Apache: sudo service apache2 restart

This also works when you previously ran your Passenger using MRI. Just run the setup as described.

When trying to install the gherkin gem, you might encounter an error with the following lines:

ERROR:  Error installing gherkin:
	ERROR: Failed to build gem native extension.
...
checking for main() in -lc... yes
creating Makefile
...
cc1: all warnings being treated as errors
Makefile:150: recipe for target 'gherkin_lexer_ar.o' failed
make: *** [gherkin_lexer_ar.o] Error 1
...

If upgrading is not an option, configure build options for gherkin:

bundle config --local build.gherkin --with-cflags=-w

Your .bundle/config fi...

Let's say you have two XML strings that are ordered differently but you don't care about the order of attributes inside containers:

a = '<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?><Authenticate><User>batman</User><Password>secret</Password></Authenticate>'
b = '<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?><Authenticate><Password>secret</Password><User>batman</User></Authenticate>'

Working with plain string comparison is not helpful, of course:

a == b
=> false

Instead, you can use the Nori gem ...

When updating WebMock, be prepared that your specs may send real requests into the depths of the internet unless you update Curb as well.\
WebMock will not complain about those requests not being stubbed.

One of the commits that made it into 1.8.0 actually breaks Curb versions below 0.7.16 while fixing it for that version (and above, hopefully).\
WebMock's hooks for Curl::Easy are sti...

We experienced problems with Sunspot and Solr on Tomcat: Umlauts (ä, ö, ü) were not correctly handled on Tomcat while everything was okay on the local development machines (your local Sunspot service you start with the sunspot:solr:run task is based on Jetty).

We use a stemmer that reduces "Sänger" to "sang" and "Sanger" to "sang" as well.
Though, results for "Sänger" where empty on Tomcat.

This is due to a UTF-8 bug in RSolr (see Github for some discussion on that).
The bug is fixed in a ...

The handy method has_select?(field, :selected => text) does not behave as expected with Cucumber 0.10.2, Capybara 0.4.1.2 and Selenium 0.2.2. It may not recognize a select field if the selected option with the text has no value. If you don't have the possibility to upgrade these Gems, probably the best way to go is to distinguish the current Capybara driver:

Then /^"([^"]*)" should be selected for "([^"]*)"(?: within "([^\"]*)")?$/ do |value, field, selector|
  with_scope(selector) do

    # currently needed due to different behav...

When your gems complain about invalid gemspecs and illformed requirements, it is most probably an error resulting from the transition from Syck to psych. To fix this:

1. go to your gemspec directory (e.g. /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/specifications/)
2. change #<Syck::DefaultKey:0x00000100e779e8> to = (equals sign) in each file that's complaining

Tooltips that are delivered through HTML attributes are encoded. Decode entities before checking for their presence.

Capybara:

Then /^there should( not)? be a(n encoded)? tooltip "([^"]*)"$/ do |negate, encoded, tooltip|
  tooltip = HTMLEntities.new.encode(tooltip) if encoded
  Then "I should#{negate} see \"#{tooltip}\" in the HTML"
end

Note

This step uses the htmlentities gem described in another card.

Ma...

Sometimes it might be helpful to have a version history for a gem, e.g. when you want to see if there is a newer Rails 2 version of your currently used gem.

At first you should search your gem at RubyGems. Example: will_paginate version history.

The "Tags" tab at GitHub might be helpful as well.

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...

This describes all the steps you'll need to get Solr up and running for your project using the Sunspot gem.

Prepare Sunspot on your development machine

What you want in your Gemfile:

gem 'sunspot_rails'
gem 'sunspot_solr'
gem 'progress_bar' # for sunspot:solr:reindex

Now define what should be indexed within Solr from your ActiveRecord models, e.g.,

class Article << ActiveRecord::Base

  searchable do
    text :title
 ...