We regularly need to connect to the server in order to e.g. access the production console. Guessing the Capistrano deploy user and then again guessing the right directory on the server is awkward, so we wrote a script that parses config/deploy and gives you the handy command shell-for.

Run it from any project directory like this, passing a Capistrano multistage deployment target:

shell-for staging

Now it also supports commands to be remotely executed before loading the bash. Use --no-bash to only execute the command and load no ba...

When you simply want to get to know Puppet, follow puppetlabs’ Learning Puppet Docs. They give you a handy introduction inside a virtual machine they provide. You can watch the talk by Garrett Honeycutt 'Expanded Introduction to Puppet'.

Do not miss their cheatsheat and their [learn-puppet virtual machine](http://info.puppetl...

We recently decided to put static content for HouseTrip.com to Amazon Cloudfront for a faster user experience. This happens fully automatically on deploy and is transparent in development. Together with a heavy use of sprites this sped up page load time quite nicely.

These are a couple of the problems you need to solve in order to do this:

• There is no good way to invalidate Cloudfront cached assets, and Cloudfront will ignor...

Run rspec-and-cucumber from any project directory to run both RSpec and Cucumber. If available, rspec_spinner or cucumber_spinner are used.

Note that features are not run when specs fail.\
If you prefer to run them in parallel or run features regardless of the spec results, please adjust it for yourself accordingly.

This script is part of our geordi gem on github.

Whenever is a Ruby gem that provides a clear syntax for writing and deploying cron jobs.

Sass now comes with user-defined functions, keyword arguments, list manipulation. Haml and Sass are now two separate gems.

The Edge Rider gem will define a method collect_ids on your ActiveRecord models, scopes, integer scalars and collections, which will return a list of their IDs:

User.last.collect_ids # => [9]
[User.first, User.last].collect_ids # => [1, 9]
User.active.collect_ids # => [4, 5, 6]
[4, 5, 6].collect_ids # => [4, 5, 6]
7.collect_ids #=> [7]

This allows you to parametrize scopes with a variety of argument types:

class Note < ActiveRecord::Base
  named_scope :for_users, lamb...

Our new scope-based authorization gem for Ruby on Rails has been released. This might one day replace Aegis as our standard authorization solution.

If you want to convert a README.rdoc file to HTML, say this from a shell:

rdoc README.rdoc

You will find the generated HTML in doc/index.html.

If you do this while working on one of our gems, please .gitignore everything in doc and don't commit the generated HTML.

Ruby gem to check whether a given bic/account-no-combination can possibly be valid for a German bank. Can also resolve German bank names from a given bic.

• Reading a URL via GET:

  curl http://example.com/
  

• Defining any HTTP method (like POST or PUT):

  curl http://example.com/users/1 -XPUT
  

• Sending data with a request:

  curl http://example.com/users -d"first_name=Bruce&last_name=Wayne"
  

  If you use -d and do not set an HTTP request method it automatically defaults to POST.

• Performing basic authentication:

  curl http://user:password@example.com/users/1
  

• All together now:

  curl http://user:password@example.com/users/1 -XPUT -d"screen_name=batman"
  

...

Rails 3

User.active.to_sql

Rails 2

Use either the Edge Rider or fake_arel gem to get #to_sql backported to Rails 2.

If you don't want to use a gem for this, you can do this with vanilla Rails 2:

User.active.construct_finder_sql({})

Since version 1.5 RubyGems requires at least Ruby 1.8.7. The last one working with Ruby 1.8.6 was RubyGems 1.4.2.

You get still download it from their servers and install RubyGems.

When installing RMagick you may get an error messages like this:

Version 2.13.1:

checking for Ruby version >= 1.8.5... yes
checking for gcc... yes
checking for Magick-config... no
Can't install RMagick 2.13.1. Can't find Magick-config in /home/arne/bin:/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/games:/var/lib/gems/1.8/bin

*** extconf.rb failed ***
Could not create Makefile due to some reason, probably lack of
necessary libraries and/or headers.  Check the mkmf.log file for more
d...

Phillip Koebbe from Ruby on Rails suggested inserting following code between the "bootstrap" and "initialize" sections of enviroment.rb. This hack fixes the problem.

if Gem::VERSION >= "1.3.6"
  module Rails
    class GemDependency
      def requirement
        r = super
        (r == Gem::Requirement.default) ? nil : r
      end
    end
  end
end

If you just upgraded to Bundler 10.0.10 you might get the following error when bringing up Rails:

/usr/lib/ruby/1.9.1/psych.rb:148:in `parse': couldn't parse YAML at line 17 column 14 (Psych::SyntaxError)

This is caused by Rails localization files (en.yml, de.yml, etc.) using symbols for various translation strings, and Bundler 10.0.10 defaults to a new YAML engine which cannot handle symbols.

You can switch back to the old YAML engine by ...

Note that you cannot currently use Ruby 1.9.2 with Rails 2 applications that use RSpec, so don't upgrade if that is your setup. The rspec-rails gem has a fatal bug that was only fixed for rspec-rails-2.x, which only supports Rails 3. There is no fix for the rspec-rails-1.3.x series of the gem which supports Rails 2.

Anyway, here are upgrade instructions if you only work with Rails 3 or don't use RSpec. You will lose all your gems in the process, but you can get them back easily if you h...

Specify these gem versions in your Gemfile:

gem 'cucumber', '~> 1.3.0'
gem 'cucumber-rails', '= 0.3.2' # max version for Rails 2
gem 'capybara', '< 2' # capybara 2+ requires Rails 3
gem 'mime-types', '< 2' # dependeny of capybara
gem 'nokogiri', '< 1.6' # dependency of capybara
gem 'rubyzip', '< 1' # dependency of selenium-webdriver, rubyzip 1+ requires Ruby 1.9
gem 'cucumber_factory'
gem 'database_cleaner', '< 1'
gem 'cucumber_spinner', '~> 0.2.5'
gem 'launchy', '~> 2.1.2'

With these versions set, `...

Add deprecation warnings and their solution or link to available solutions.

Global access to Rake DSL methods is deprecated. Please include Rake::DSL into classes and modules which use the Rake DSL methods.

Open your Rakefile and add the following line above YourApp::Application.load_tasks:

YourApp::Application.class_eval do
  include Rake::DSL
end

Use of ole/file_system is deprecated. Use ole/storage (the file_system api is recommended and enabled by default)...

We are maintaining some vintage projects with tests written in Test::Unit instead of RSpec. Mocks and stubs are not features of Test::Unit, but you can use the Mocha gem to add those facilities.

The following is a quick crash course to using mocks and stubs in Mocha, written for RSpec users:

|---------------------------------------------------------|
| RSpec | Mocha |
|---------------------------------------------------------|
| obj = double() | obj = mock() |
| obj.stub(:method => 'value') | `obj.stubs...

When working with large Sass files you will notice that the first request after a change to a Sass file takes quite some time. This is because the CSS files are being generated from the Sass files the moment the application answers your request (Sass looks at the files and recompiles if the timestamp changed); it takes even longer when you build sprites with the Lemonade gem.

To avoid this, have Sass watch the files for changes and compile them into CSS files immediately. Th...

You will occasionally need to clean out your database while keeping the schema intact, e.g. when someone inserted data in a migration or when you had to kill -9 a frozen test process.

Old Capybara versions already have the Database Cleaner gem as dependency. Otherwise add database_cleaner to your *Gemfile`. This lets you say this from the Rails console:

DatabaseCleaner.strategy = :truncation
DatabaseCleaner.cl...

After updating your RubyGems, you will probably not be able to run Capistrano any more, but receive an error similar to this:
can't activate net-ssh (= 2.0.22) for [], already activated net-ssh-2.1.0 for [] (Gem::LoadError)

If you have Bundler installed, you can use bundle exec to avoid this problem as follows:

Create a gemfile at ~/.capistrano/Gemfile (or at some other sensible place), that only contains these 2 lines:
source 'http://rubygems.org'
gem 'capistrano'
gem 'capistrano-ext' # You need this for multistag...

RubyGems 1.6.0 has undergone some changes which may cause Rails 2.x applications to break with an error like this one (e.g. when running script/server):
/usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/activesupport-2.3.8/lib/active_support/dependencies.rb:55: uninitialized constant ActiveSupport::Dependencies::Mutex (NameError)

Fix it by adding the following not only to your environment.rb but also into your script/server file, in both cases before boot.rb is required.
require 'thread'

If you still get the error above you can also add `require 'thre...