An auto-mapper for BEM classes in Cucumber selectors
When you are using the #selector_for
helper in Cucumber steps, as e.g. Spreewald does, the following snippet will save you typing. It recognizes a prose BEM-style selector and maps it to the corresponding BEM class.
For a variation on this idea, see An auto-mapper for ARIA labels and BEM classes in Cucumber selectors.
Examples
"the main menu" -> '.main-menu'
"the item box's header" -> '.item-box--header'
Here are some examples of steps (using Spreewald, too):
T...
Rails: Running specific migrations
When running migrations with rake db:migrate
, there's the STEP
and VERSION
parameters that you can pass to nearly all commands.
# Migrate
rake db:migrate
rake db:migrate STEP=2
rake db:migrate VERSION=20080906120000
# Redo
rake db:migrate:redo
rake db:migrate:redo STEP=2
rake db:migrate:redo VERSION=20080906120000
# Rollback (starting from latest migration)
rake db:rollback
rake db:rollback STEP=2
# Run the `down` migration path of a certain migration file
rake db:migrate:down VERSION=20080906120000
Git: How to get a useful diff when renaming files
tldr; Use git diff -M
or git diff --find-renames
when you've moved a few files around.
Usage
$ git diff --help
Options:
-M[<n>], --find-renames[=<n>]
Detect renames. If n is specified, it is a threshold on the similarity index
(i.e. amount of addition/deletions compared to the file’s size). For example,
-M90% means Git should consider a delete/add pair to be a rename if more than
90% of the file hasn’t changed. Without a % sign, the number is to be read as
a fraction, with a decimal point...
greckout - a bash script to grep and checkout your git branches
greckout query
This will list all branches matching your query as input options for git checkout
greckout ar
1) ar/cache-api-keys-1098
2) ar/add-categories-object-to-tv-show-1382
3) ...
How to load an SQL dump from a migration
If you want to load an SQL dump from an ActiveRecord migration, you might find this to be harder than you thought. While you can call ActiveRecord::Base.connection.execute(sql)
to execute arbitrary SQL commands, the MySQL connection is configured to only accept a single statement per query. If you try to feed it multiple statements, it will die with You have an error in your SQL syntax.
You can work around this by opening a second MySQL connection that does accept multiple statements per call.
Below is an example for a migration that l...
Geordi 1.0 released
Geordi 1.0 features a command line application geordi
, that holds most of Geordi's previous commands.
New features
-
command help and usage examples right within
geordi
(geordi help
andgeordi help <command>
) -
quick command access: type just the first few letters of a command, e.g.
geordi rs
orgeordi dev[server]
-
command dependencies, e.g.
geordi rspec
invokesgeordi bundle-install
(which bundles only if needed) -
no cluttered
/usr/bin
, but all commands in one handy tool -
template for easily adding new...
How to set up database_cleaner for Rails with Cucumber and RSpec
Add gem 'database_cleaner'
to your Gemfile. Then:
Cucumber & Rails 3+
# features/support/database_cleaner.rb
DatabaseCleaner.clean_with(:deletion) # clean once, now
DatabaseCleaner.strategy = :transaction
Cucumber::Rails::Database.javascript_strategy = :deletion
Cucumber & Rails 2
The latest available cucumber-rails
for Rails 2 automatically uses database_cleaner
when cucumber/rails/active_record
is required -- but only if transactional fixtures are off. To have database_cleaner
work correctly:
- Add the ...
Rendering: repaint, reflow/relayout, restyle
Some insight into how browser rendering engines work. The article shows how the way you manipulate styles (and the DOM) can affect rendering performance by forcing the browser to re-paint large portions of the screens, or re-calculate the dimensions of a large subtree of DOM nodes.
Materialized views with Sequel
Sequel is an awesome ORM such as ActiveRecord. The linked article describes how easily you can implement and use materialized views with postgres as your underlying database.
Jasmine: Testing AJAX calls that manipulate the DOM
Here is a Javascript function reloadUsers()
that fetches a HTML snippet from the server using AJAX and replaces the current .users
container in the DOM:
window.reloadUsers = ->
$.get('/users').then (html) ->
$('.users').html(html)
Testing this simple function poses a number of challenges:
- It only works if there is a
<div class="users">...</div>
container in the current DOM. Obviously the Jasmine spec runner has no such container. - The code requests
/users
and we want to prevent network interaction in our uni...
Getter and setter functions for JavaScript properties
JavaScript objects can have getter and setter functions that are called when a property is read from or written to.
For example, if you'd like an object that has a virtual person.fullName
attribute that dynamically composes person.firstName
and person.lastName
:
var person = {
firstName: 'Guybrush',
lastName: 'Threepwood',
get fullName() {
return this.firstName + " " + this.lastName;
},
set fullName(name) {
var parts = name.split(" ");
this.firstName = parts[0];
this.lastName = parts[1];
}
};
`...
Taking screenshots in Capybara
Capybara-screenshot can automatically save screenshots and the HTML for failed Capybara tests in Cucumber, RSpec or Minitest.
Requires Capybara-Webkit, Selenium or poltergeist for making screenshots. Screenshots are saved into $APPLICATION_ROOT/tmp/capybara
.
Manually saving a page
Additionally you can trigger the same behavior manually from the test using Capybara::Session#save_and_open_page and [...
pgcli - Postgres command line interface
A CLI for working with Postgres databases. Ships with auto-completion and syntax highlighting.
Active Record and PostgreSQL — Ruby on Rails Guides
Rails guide that covers PostgreSQL-specific column types and usages for Active Record.
You should especially keep in mind the special datatypes that PostgreSQL offers. \
Types like json
and array
take away a lot of the pain that you had on MySQL projects.
Example use cases for array
are tags or storing foreign keys (instead of a join model). You can even index them.
CarrierWave: How to remove GIF animation
When accepting GIF images, you will also accept animated GIFs. Resizing them can be a time-consuming task and will block a Rails worker until the image is processed.
Save yourself that trouble, and simply tell ImageMagick to drop any frames but the first one.
Add the following to your uploader class:
process :remove_animation
private
def remove_animation
if content_type == 'image/gif'
manipulate! { |image| image.collapse! }
end
end
You may also define that process
for specific versions only (e.g. only for thum...
AngularJS Performance in Large Applications
A lot of the advice involves less separations of concerns in your code ("don't use $watch", "don't use isolated scopes"), but it's a nice summary of what eats time in Angular.
Note that for the purpose of this article "large" mostly mean "large number of watchers/bindings on a single screen". Angular doesn't automatically become large just because you have a lot of screens.
The Easiest Way to Parse URLs with JavaScript
A very clever hack to parse a structured URL object is to create a <a>
element and set its href
to the URL you want to parse.
You can then query the <a>
element for its components like schema, hostname, port, pathname, query, hash:
var parser = document.createElement('a');
parser.href = 'http://heise.de/bar';
parser.hostname; // => 'heise.de'
pathname = parser.pathname; // => '/bar'
if (pathname[0] != '/')
pathname = '/' + pathname // Fix IE11
One advantag...
How to: Context-dependent word expansion in RubyMine
One of the many useful features of TextMate is autocompletion of words. If I were in TextMate right now, I could write "au[tab]", and it would complete it to "autocompletion". RubyMine can do this, too. When you write a word (e.g. a variable name), just hit ALT + / repeatedly and it will offer all completions for the letters you typed. This action is called Cyclic Expand Word in RubyMine / IntelliJ IDEA.
This feature keeps you from mistyping variable names, saves you keystrokes and speeds up development. ~10 keystrokes to the price ...
Vim: How to write a file you opened without sudo
Have you ever opened a file with vim, edited it and when you wanted to save your changes it told you "Can't open file for writing", because you opened it without sudo
? There's an easy hack to let you write it anyway:
:w !sudo tee %
The linked SO post explains in detail what will happen.
Create a shortcut
If you're already used to the "exit vim, run vim with sudo again (sudo !!
) and save" workflow but can't remember the above command, you may create an easy-to-remember shortcut. Add this snippet to your .vimrc
:
" Al...
How to combine "change", "up", and "down" in a Rails migration
Rails migrations allow you to use a change
method whose calls are automatically inverted for the down path. However, if you need to some path-specific logic (like SQL UPDATE
statements) you can not define up
and down
methods at the same time.
If you were to define define all 3 of them, Rails would only run change
and ignore up
and down
. However, Rails 4+ features a helper method called reversible
:
class MyMigration < ActiveRecord::Migration
def cha...
Using Passenger Standalone for development
For our production servers we use Passenger as a Ruby application server. While it is possible to use Passenger for development as an Apache module, the installation process is not for the faint of heart.
Luckily Passenger also comes as a standalone binary which requires zero configuration.
You can Passenger Standalone as a replacement for Webrick or Thin if you'd like to:
- Use SSL certificates locally
- Get performance behavior that is closer to ...
AngularJS 1 Performance: One-time bindings in expressions
In addition to the {{ myValue }}
two-way binding syntax, since Angular 1.3 there's a one-time binding syntax, prefixing the value or expression with ::
, e.g. {{ ::myValue }}, {{ ::myValue >= 42 }} and {{ ::myExpression(value) | someFilter }}
.
One-time bound expressions get dropped from the list of watchers as soon as they can be resolved. Performance-wise the impact for this small change is huge, since Angular apparently slowes down with too many watchers registered [(Source)](http://www.binpress.com/tutorial/speeding-up-angular-js-wi...
Deterministic ordering of records by created_at timestamp
Creating records in specs can be so fast that two records created instantly after one another might have the same created_at timestamp (especially since those timestamps don't have an indefinitely high resolution). When ordering lists by timestamps, you should therefore always include a final order condition using the primary key of the table.
class Photo < ActiveRecord::Base
scope :by_date, -> { order('created_at DESC, id DESC') }
end
Photo.by_date
Remember to include the id
field in the database index.
Returning an empty ActiveRecord scope
Returning an empty scope can come in handy, e.g. as a default object. In Rails 4 you can achieve this by calling none
on your ActiveRecord model.
MyModel.none # returns an empty ActiveRecord::Relation object
For older Rails versions you can use the attached initializer to get a none
scope.