When you click a link or a press a button on a Selenium-controlled browser, the call will return control to your test before the next page is loaded. This can lead to concurrency issues when a Cucumber step involves a Selenium action and a Ruby call which both change the same resources.

Take the following step which signs in a user through the browser UI and then sets a flag on the user that was just signed in:

Given /^the user "([^"]*)" signed in (\d) days ago$/ do |name, days|
  visit new_session_path
  fill_in 'Username', :w...

Note: For PostgreSQL you should use advisory locks. For MySQL we still recommend the solution in this card.

If you need to synchronize multiple rails processes, you need some shared resource that can be used as a mutex. One option is to simply use your existing (MySQL) database.

The attached code provides a database-based model level mutex for MySQL. You use it by simply calling

Lock.acquire('string to synchronize on') do
  # non-th...

1. Have a backup.

2. Stop MySQL:

   sudo service mysql stop
   

3. Move (or copy) your mysql directory. If you want /mnt/mysql to be the new directory, do it like this:

   sudo mv /var/lib/mysql /mnt/
   

4. Open your MySQL configuration (sudo vim /etc/mysql/my.cnf) and change the datadir value to your new path (e.g. /mnt/mysql)

5. Modify your AppArmor configuration:

   sudo vim /etc/apparmor.d/usr.sbin.mysqld
   

   Change/copy the lines granting access to /var/lib/mysql to your new path. Otherwise MySQL will not ...

What are Google’s plans for turning WebM into a genuinely open standard, one that is based on consensus like the rest of W3C’s HTML5 effort? Would Google fully support such an effort? Even the WebM project’s domain is controlled by Google. Google chose to release WebM under the Creative Commons license which would theoretically allow a standards body to use the specification as a basis for a truly open standard. Would Google agree to adopt the specification and changes that would emerge from an open process in a timely and robust manner? Wha...

When you use the send_file method to send a local file to the browser, you can save resources on the application server by setting the :x_sendfile option to true. This option is activated by default for Rails 3, so you need to understand this.

What this option does is not to send any data at all, but rather set the local file path as a new response header:

X-Sendfile: /opt/www/awesome-project/shared/downloads/image.png

When the response comes back from Rails to...

This card describes a Cucumber step that lets you say:

When I perform basic authentication as "username/password" and I visit the admin area

The path component ("... the admin area") is parsed through your path_to helper in features/support/paths.rb.

Capybara

The step definition is part of Spreewald. The step has been tested with multiple versions of Capybara, Rack::Test and Selenium.

Webrat (legacy)

This is a simpler version of the step above:

When /...

In case https://www.rubydoc.info/ is to slow or offline, you can also read a gem documentation offline.

Start a server with gem server and go to http://0.0.0.0:8808/. Here you will find a list of all installed gems and it is possible to navigate to the documentation if installed e.g. http://0.0.0.0:8808/doc_root/rubocop-0.77.0/

In case you set the configured RubyGems to not install documentation by default, you need to add generate the documentation for the specific gem.

gem install rubocop --document
`...

I love ETags, but there’s something that annoys me: most implementations revolve around pulling a record out of a data store and only “rendering” the response if it hasn’t been modified. 

The problem with this approach is that request has already gone through most of your application stack–parsing params, authentication, authorization, a few database lookups–so ETags are only saving you render time and some bandwidth.

While working on a Sinatra-based JSON web service that gets very heavy traffic, I wanted to find a way to short-circuit...

Find-as-you-type boxes are usually built by observing changes in a text field, and querying the server via AJAX for search results or suggestions when the field has changed.

A common problem with this implementation is that there is no guarantee that AJAX responses are evaluated in the same order as the original requests. The effect for the user is that the search results are flashing back and forth while the user is typing the query, and when the user has stopped typing the last results don't always match the final query.

Workarounds
----...

When you are using Apache for development, it still accepts connections from everyone in the same network as you.

In order to only allow requests to your Apache coming from your local computer, edit your /etc/apache2/ports.conf so all Listen directives point to 127.0.0.1:

Listen 127.0.0.1:80
<IfModule mod_ssl.c>
    Listen 127.0.0.1:443
</IfModule>

After the change stop and start your Apache and check with netstat that Apache no longer listens to 0.0.0.0:

sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 stop
sudo /etc/init.d/ap...

When your site is mapped into the URL-space of another server using mod_proxy, ProxyPass and ProxyPassReverse, all requests in your Apache logs are logged with the IP address of the proxying server. The IP address of the original client doing the request is not logged, making it difficult to trace problems and run statistics.

Short answer

There is no easy way to fix this. Use the log of the proxying server instead, which logs the original client IPs you're looking for.

Long answer

You can fix this for your ac...

In order to redirect all requests from redirecting-host.com to desired-host.com while keeping path and query params unchanged, change your Apache VHost to something like this:

ServerName desired-host.com
ServerAlias redirecting-host.com
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^desired-host.com$
RewriteRule ^.*$ http://desired-host.com%{REQUEST_URI} [R=301,L]

Take care to keep all those ^, $ and ! as seen in the example.

If your controller spec never reaches your controller code:

1. Make sure you are signed in.

2. Make sure you are actually triggering a request by saying get :edit or something siliar.

3. Know that views are not rendered by default for controller specs unless you tell them to (render_views).
   ^
   describe UsersController do
   describe '#edit' do
   it 'should work' do
   sign_in
   get :edit
   end
   end
   end

   define something like this in your spec_helper.rb:

   def sign_in(user = User....

In order to go back one page in your Cucumber tests, you can use the following step definition for Capybara:

When(/^I go back$/) do
  visit page.driver.request.env['HTTP_REFERER']
end

If you're on Webrat, this should work:

When(/^I go back$/) do
  visit request.env["HTTP_REFERER"])
end

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

This collection of Sass mixins enables cross-browser styling (including IE with CSS3PIE) with less lines of code.

This enables PIE for IE up to version 8 only (the first part is not possible in Haml, so use ERB):

<!--[if !IE]><!-->
  <%= stylesheet_link_tag 'screen', :media => 'screen' %>
<!--<![endif]-->
<!--[if lte IE 8]>
  <%= stylesheet_link_tag 'screen_with_pie', :media => 'screen' %>
<![endif]-->

These would be your two screen Sasses:

# screen_with_pie.sass

...

The following initializer provides an :alias => "my_route_name" option to restful routes in your route.rb. This simply makes the same route also available under a different ..._path / ..._url helpers.

For example,

map.resources :notes, :alias => :snippets

Gives you

notes_path, notes_url, new_note_path... #as always
snippets_path, snippets_url, new_snippet_path... #from the alias

Put this into an initializer:

This note describes how to setup a box running Ubuntu to share its Internet connection with another PC.

• You will need two network interfaces to do this. One will connect to the Internet (e.g. UMTS card), one will share the connection with the other PC (e.g. Wired LAN).
• On the Ubuntu PC, right-click on the connection symbol in the tray. Select Edit connections.
• Switch to the wired LAN card. Go to Edit and set the method to Shared to other computers.
• Connect the other PC to your wired LAN card. You can use the same cable that wo...

If a controller action responds to other formats than HTML (XML, PDF, Excel, JSON, ...), you can reach that code in a controller spec like this:

describe UsersController do
  describe '#index' do
    it 'should be able to send an excel file' do
       # stubs and expectations go here
       get :index, :format => 'xls'
    end
  end
end

Remember that both the :format parameter and the HTTP_ACCEPT header can m...

When using form_for you can give the form's target URL either as a string or an array:

form_for(admin_user_path(@user)) do ... end
# same as:
form_for([:admin, @user]) do ... end

Same for link_to:

link_to("Label", edit_admin_user_path(@user))
# same as
link_to("Label", [:edit, :admin, @user])

polymorphic_path and polymorphic_url

If you would like to generate a path or URL string from an array of route components just as form_for does, you can use polymorphic_path or polymorphic_url:

polymorphic...

If you want to see how long your database queries actually take, you need to disable MySQL's query cache. This can be done globally by logging into a database console, run

SET GLOBAL query_cache_type=OFF;

and restart your rails server.

You can also disable the cache on a per query basis by saying

SELECT SQL_NO_CACHE * FROM ...

You also probably want to disable Rails internal (per-request) cache. For this, wrap your code with a call to ActiveRecord::Base.uncached. For example, as an around_filter:

d...

This post will describe how I stumbled upon a code path in the Linux kernel which allows external programs to be launched when a core dump is about to happen. I provide a link to a short and ugly Ruby script which captures a faulting process, runs gdb to get a backtrace (and other information), captures the core dump, and then generates a notification email.

A good tool to generate strong passwords and secrets is "apg". You can get it with

sudo apt-get install apg

To create a strong secret for sessions, hashed Paperclip paths, etc. say

apg -m128 -a1 -E\'\"

Arguments explained:

• The -m parameter defines the secret length
• -a1 makes apg choose from all 7-bit ASCII characters instead of just the alphabet
• -E\'\" excludes quote characters so you can easily paste the secret into a Ru...