HOWTOs for Ruby on Rails and JavaScript

How to fix: Bundler 1.13 breaks parallel_tests

When running tests via parallel_tests, you may encounter an error:

cannot load such file -- parallel_tests/gherkin/runtime_logger
Error creating formatter: ParallelTests::Gherkin::RuntimeLogger (LoadError)

This will happen when you upgrade Bundler to version 1.13.x and appears to be "by design" since there is a Bundler config option to restore previous behavior.

You can fix it by setting that flag. You should commit the resulting config file into the repository!

bundle config --local disable_exec_load true

There is a Git...

github.com

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RCov: The difference between "code coverage" and "total coverage"

Code coverage is the ratio of code lines kissed by a test vs. the total number of lines in your source files. This sounds meaningful, but isn't.

Total coverage additionally ignores whitespace and comments when computing the coverage ratio, which is what you want.

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Beware: Nested Spreewald patiently blocks are not patient

Note: The behaviour of Spreewald's within step is as described below for version < 1.9.0; For Spreewald >= 1.9.0 it is as described in Solution 1.

When doing integration testing with cucumber and selenium you will often encounter problems with timing - For example if your test runs faster than your application, html elements may not yet be visible when the test looks for them. That's why Spreewald (a collection of cucumber steps) has a concept of doing things patiently, which means a given b...

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Change how Capybara sees or ignores hidden elements

Short version

Capybara has a global option (Capybara.ignore_hidden_elements) that determines whether Capybara sees or ignores hidden elements.
Prefer not to change this global option, and use the :visible option when calling page.find(...). This way the behavior is only changed for this one find and your step doesn't have confusing side effects.
Every Capybara driver has its own notion of "visibility".

Long version

Capybara has an option (Capybara.ignore_hidden_elements) to configure the default...

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How to install the `xelatex` binary on Ubuntu 14.04

Just install the texlive-xetex package:

sudo apt-get install texlive-xetex

Running integration tests without texlive-xetex will produce an error during xelatex execution:

RTeX::Document::ExecutableNotFoundError

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Fix: Capybara is very slow when filling out fields in large forms

In large forms (30+ controls) new Capybara version become [extremely slow] when filling out fields. It takes several seconds per input. The reason for this is that Capybara generates a huge slow XPath expression to find the field.

The attached code patches fill_in with a much faster implementation. It's a dirty fix and probably does a lot less than Capybara's own fill_in so don't use it unless you are having problems with test suites that are unusable because of this...

fast_fill_in.rb

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Let the browser choose the protocol

Use protocol independent URLs whenever possible so that the browser will choose the protocol related to the protocol which the page is delivered with.

Example issues

When your page is delivered via https and you provide a youtube video only via http the most browsers (e.g. Firefox, Chrome) won't display the video.
When you deliver your youtube video via https://youtu.be/jyElDp98HdI your test which checks that the embeded video is rendered in the view will fail because your test server doesn't use https

Solution

Let your lin...

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A nicer way to run RSpec and/or Cucumber

geordi, our collection of awesome shell scripts, has been extended by three scripts to help you call RSpec or Cucumber:

cuc

This script runs Cucumber the way you want it:

Prints some line feeds to easily find your test results when you come back to the console later
Configures Cucumber to use cucumber_spinner if it is available in your Gemfile
Runs Cucumber under bundle exec
Uses an old version of Firefox for Selenium (Javascript) features...

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Error "execution expired (Timeout::Error)" when using Selenium and Webmock

If you get the above error when running tests in bulk (but not individually), it's actually the fault of Webmock.

Updating Webmock to version 1.7+ fixes this.

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Fix a spec that only runs when called directly

When a spec only runs when it is called directly, but not as part of the whole test suite, make sure the filename is foo_spec.rb instead of just foo.rb.

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Testing Cookie Limits

TL;DR If you want to support most browsers, then don't exceed 50 cookies per domain, and don't exceed 4093 bytes per domain (i.e. total size of all cookies <= 4093 bytes)

Behind the link, you'll find a simple HTML page that offers some cookie tests (how large, how many etc) and an overview of this data for various browsers.

Fun fact: You cannot delete cookies with a key that hits the size limit and has a small value.

browsercookielimits.squawky.net

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CoffeeScript

Imagine all the syntactical delights of Ruby and Haml for your JavaScript. You write in a nice language, but get normal JavaScript at runtime. All whilst having full access to 3rd-party JavaScript libraries (jQuery, PrototypeJS), debugging support (it becomes pure, readable JavaScript), existing support from test suites (it’s normal JavaScript) and growing support from various text editors (TextMate, Vim, Emacs).

jashkenas.github.com

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Geordi hints

Reminder of what you can do with Geordi.

Note: If you alias Geordi to something short like g, running commands gets much faster!
Note: You only need to type the first letters of a command to run it, e.g. geordi dep will run the deploy command.

geordi deploy

Guided deployment, including push, merge, switch branches. Does nothing without confirmation.

geordi capistrano

Run something for all Capistrano environments, e.g. geordi cap deploy

geordi setup -t -d staging

When you just clon...

github.com

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Error "undefined method last_comment"

This error message may occur when rspec gets loaded by rake, e.g. when you migrate the test database.

NoMethodError: undefined method 'last_comment' for #<Rake::Application:0x0055a617d37ad0>

Rake 11 removes a method that rspec-core < 3.4.4 depends on. To fix, lock Rake to < 11 in your Gemfile:

  gem 'rake', '< 11', # Removes a method that rspec-core < 3.4 depends on

stackoverflow.com

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Web Operations 101 For Developers

This post is not about devops, it's not about lean startups, it's not about web scale, it's not about the cloud, and it's not about continuous deployment. This post is about you, the developer who's main purpose in life has always been to build great web applications. In a pretty traditional world you write code, you write tests for it, you deploy, and you go home. Until now.

paperplanes.de

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How to hide your selenium browser window with "headless"

Note: While the solution in this card should still work, we prefer another solution now: Hide your Selenium browser window with a VNC server.

If you would like to hide the annoying selenium browser window that always gets the focus and prevents you from working, you can use the headless gem. This note provides some instructions how you can get it to work with your cucumber accepta...

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Bash script to list commits by Pivotal Tracker ID

The main benefit of our convention to prefix commits by their corresponding Pivotal Tracker ID is that we can easily detect commits that belong to the same story. You can either do that manually or use the bash script below by copying it somewhere to your .bashrc.

# Usage: ptcommits 123456
function ptcommits {
  if test "$1"
  then
    local PTID=$(echo "$1" | grep "[0-9]*" -o) # Allow URLs
    git log --onel...

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Know what makes your browser pant

I figure we needed a definitive reference for what work is triggered by changing various CSS properties. It's something I get asked about often enough by developers, and while we can do tests with DevTools, I have both the time and inclination to shortcut that for everyone. I'm nice like that. —Paul Lewis

csstriggers.com

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How much should I refactor?

The Rails community has been abuzz with object-oriented programming, SOLID principles, laws, design patterns, and other principles, practices, and patterns. We’ve (re)discovered new tools and techniques to separate and reuse logic, making code easier to test, understand, and maintain. Now that we’ve learned about all these new tools, when do we use them?

robots.thoughtbot.com

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New geordi script: migrate-all

Use the command geordi migrate to migrate your databases and to prepare them before running tests. The abbrevation geordi m works as well.

It will run rake db:migrate if parallel_tests does not exist in your Gemfile
Otherwise it runs b rake db:migrate and then executes b rake parallel:prepare if parallel_tests was found in your Gemfile.

github.com

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Error during Rails 5 upgrade: Environment data not found in the schema

This error is raised because your old database does not have a configured environment yet, which Rails 5 enforces.

If this error occurs while migrating your parallel test databases, make sure to update the parallel_tests gem first: current versions fix this. If you're still using Cucumber < v3, the latest version of parallel_tests will be 2.18.0.

blog.bigbinary.com

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