Sometimes, when running a rake task, RubyGems 1.8.5 raises an error:

rake aborted!
undefined method `specifications' for "/usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8":String

This has been fixed since May 31 but is still not available as a new RubyGems version.

Either wait for a new version to eventually come out, downgrade to some really old version (1.6.2 works for some) or apply the fix manually:

• Find your rubygems.rb -- mine was located at `/usr/local/lib/sit...

When CoffeeScript was added to Rails 3.1 they forgot one very important part, the ability to use it when responding to JavaScript (JS) requests!

In Rails 3.1 it’s incredibly easy to build your application’s JavaScript using CoffeeScript, however if you fire off an AJAX request to your application you can only write your response using regular JavaScript and not CoffeeScript, at least until CoffeeBeans came along.

1. Get "PuTTY Link" and "Pageant" (an SSH key agent) from the PuTTY download page.

2. Run pageant.exe, find its icon inside your system tray and add your SSH key.

3. Open up a cmd and put the full path to PuTTY's plink.exe into the GIT_SSH environment variable, e.g.:

   set GIT_SSH=D:\PuTTY\plink.exe
   

You can then use Git like you would on any sane operating system. Just go ahead and git clone, git pull, etc.

Also, you may want to add the environment vari...

Because your examples should not change global state, you should not need to care about the order in which RSpec processes your .rb files. However, in some cases you might want to know.

RSpec 3

• Runs .rb files in alphabetical order of their file paths by default (or when you specify --order defined).
• You run t...

In order to request a SSL certificate from any dealer, you usually need a CSR certificate. As both the CSR as well as key are created in this step, make sure you save this certificate on a trusted, secure machine only. Usually this is your production environment.

Run this on the server (not on your machine) as root.\
Replace your-domain.tld with the domain you request the certificate for and YYYY with the current year so you will not have any conflicts when requesting a certificate next year.

openssl req -new -sha256 -out www.your-dom...

This snippet makes links that refer to an anchor (like "<a href="#something">...</a>") scroll softly to it.\
In this example we only do it for links that also own a data-animate attribute.

$('a[href^="#"][data-animate]').live('click', function() {
  var hash = $(this).attr('href');
  var offset = $(hash).offset();
  if (offset) {
    $('html, body').animate({ scrollTop: offset.top }, 'slow');
    location.hash = hash;
    return false;
  }
});

Note that this could basically work for any element whos...

Today I needed to execute a ruby gem executable with sudo. But, surprisingly, bash would tell me command not found for the gem that ran lovely without sudo.

Gem bins are installed to /var/lib/gems/1.8/bin, which is not in sudo’s PATH. Unfortunately, you can’t change the path, since sudo for Ubuntu is compiled with the --with-secure-path option.

#Solution A: symlink the gems (if you need only some few gems)

• for each gem you need for sudo, run `ln -s /var/lib/gems/1.8/bin/gem_for_sudo /usr/local/bin/gem_for_sudo

#Soluti...

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...

You set a flash message and it shows up as it should. However, it is displayed again the next time you follow a link. Here is why:

You have to differentiate between a render and a redirect_to because a flash message is only deleted after a redirect. If you want a message to be seen in the next request after a redirect, use flash[]. If you want a message to be seen in the current request, use flash.now[].

Workaround for the lazy

If you cannot be bothered to decide which flash hash to use, or if the fl...

• 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"
  

...

The Basic Authentication header encodes username and password. Effectively, it's just Base64 plus a "Basic" prefix.
You can use ActionController::HttpAuthentication::Basic.encode_credentials for that, and put its result into the Authorization request header.

Request specs

For request specs, use the :header option.

it 'requires authentication' do
  get '/'
  expect(response.status).to eq(401)
end

it 'accepts valid credentials' do
  encoded_credentials = ActionController::HttpAuthentication::Basic.encode_credentials(use...

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...

By default, Opera 11 hides any passed params and the URL's protocol until you focus the address bar.

To disable hiding URL parameters, open up Tools → Preferences (Ctrl+F12) → Advanced → Browsing and check "Show full web address in address field". No need to touch opera:config.

The badge that displays the page's "zone" (Web, Secure, Opera, ...) will be shrinked so you can still see a yellow lock for proper SSL connections, etc.

Artifice allows you to replace the Net::HTTP subsystem of Ruby with an equivalent that routes all requests to a Rack application.

You can use Sinatra, raw Rack, or even Rails as your application, allowing you to build up an equivalent to the remote service you are mocking out using familiar and convenient tools to route requests and build up responses.

Within an event handler, there are multiple methods to cancel event propagation, each with different semantics.

• event.preventDefault()

  Only prevents the default browser behavior for the click, i.e. going to a different url or submitting a form.

  When invoked on a touchstart event, this also prevents mouse events like click to be triggered.

• event.stopPropagation()

  Prevents the event from bubbling up the DOM.

• `event.st...

The information in this card is only relevant for Rails 2.3-era apps.

This note gives a quick introduction into caching methods (page caching, action caching and fragment caching) in rails and describes some specific problems and solutions.

The descriptions below are valid for Rails 2 and 3. Recently, caching with timestamp- or content-based keys has become more popular which saves you the pain of invalidating stale caches.

How to enable/disable caching

To enable or disable caching in rails you ca...

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, `...

Now allows to list transition paths from and to arbitrary states.

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)...

If in your application your users pass along params that result in filenames, like invoices/generated?number=123. This could be your (very careless) controller method:

def generated
  send_file File.join(Rails.root, 'shared', 'invoices', params[:number])
end

This allows your users not only to access those files but also any files your application can read, like this:

invoices/generated?number=../../../../../etc/passwd
# => send_file '/etc/passwd'

You do not want this. In most cases you should prefer a show met...

Pie sometimes does not properly redraw elements upon changes. This often happens when the change comes from somewhere further up the DOM.

Consider something like:

<ul>
  <li class="active"><div class="content">Active element</div></li>
  <li class="inactive"><div class="content">Inactive element</div></li>
</ul>

with CSS
li .content {
-webkit-box-shadow: #666 0px 2px 3px;
-moz-box-shadow: #666 0px 2px 3px;
box-shadow: #666 0px 2px 3px;
behavior: url(/PIE.htc);

  back...

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...