When you need to patch an existing gem, one way is to "vendor" the gem by copying it into the vendor/gems directory of your Rails project. You can then make any changes you require and Rails will use the vendored version of the gem after a server restart. Unfortunately you need to perform some additional steps to marry Rails and the copied gem. This notes describes what to do.

With Bundler

This is super-painful. If you just copy the gem to vendor/gems, Rails will complain:

Unpacked gem foolib in vendor/gems has no s...

ActsAsSolr::Post.execute(Solr::Request::Delete.new(:query => "#{Location.solr_configuration[:type_field]}:#{ModelClass}"))
ActsAsSolr::Post.execute(Solr::Request::Commit.new)

This can happen during development when classes without automatic reloading are pointing to classes with automatic reloading. E.g. some class in lib is calling Model.static_method.

Workaround A

Stop referencing autoloaded classes from static files. If you can't, see workaround B and C.

Workaround B

Make sure the offending file (the one referencing the autoloaded class) is autoloaded, too. You may do this:

# config/application.rb

  config.paths.add 'offending/file/parent/directory', eager_load: true

Workaroun...

Basic configuration

Please keep this config simple. It should be a starting point for new developers learning Git.

[user]
  name = Your Name
  email = your.name@domain.com

[branch]
  sort = -committerdate
[color]
   ui = auto
[color "branch"]
  current = yellow reverse
  local = yellow
  remote = green
[color "diff"]
  whitespace = white reverse
  meta = blue reverse
  frag = blue reverse
  old = red
  new = green
[color "status"]
  added = green
  changed = yellow
  untracked = cyan
[interactive]
  singlekey = true # Do not requir...

Gem to provide nice looking urls ("/blog/the-greatest-bug-i-never-fixed"). If you don't need anything too special (like i18n for the urls) it works as a drop-in-replacement. It basically overwrites #to_param to return the slug, and .find to search by the slug.

Make sure, everywhere you build paths, you use model_path(:id => model) instead of model_path(:id => model.id). You also need to adapt all code using something like .find_by_id. The regular .find is fine.

See the github README for installation instructions.

Don't forget ...

httptunnel creates a bidirectional virtual data connection tunnelled in HTTP requests. The HTTP requests can be sent via an HTTP proxy if so desired.

I have been playing around with RESTful Rails recently. Below is my collection or Rails REST howtos, tutorials and other resources I have found so far.

PUT means update the resource with this entity, which tends means "overwrite". Now think for a moment about how that works for things like tags in a blog post - if I leave the tag out, am I saying remove it? Ignore it? Do I have to echo back all the data so it doesn't get scrubbed?

Once you start introducing partial updates, you open yourself for caching problems. doing partial updates means all cached copies of the original resource are now invalid.

i keep looking for ways to help people 'get' REST. not URLs or HTTP Methods; but REST itself - in a nutshell. so here's a new angle i've started playing with: "REST Upside Down."

There are many wonderful things about Rails and the Rails ecosystem. A clean, well-lighted path for keeping all your extensions up to date is not one of them.

One of the things that I always wanted to do but never got around to was to analyze a user’s browsing history to estimate age and gender.

SWFRIP is a Macromedia Flash resource extractor and editor. It can save resources in various formats, including SVG conversion from the flash vector format, decompile ActionScript, and remove the protect tag from SWF files.

So, as a result, people using RESTful ideas to talk to browsers have to put the smarts back on the server. They invent new URLs which (for example) return a resource, but return it all wrapped up in the HTML needed to display it as a form for browser-based editing.

In earlier version I needed to do an awkward thing that only affected development mode, where Rails unloads all classes after each request. run_later runs code in a separate thread, and depending on how long that code runs the classes would be unloaded when they're still accessed from the worker.

Porter is essentially the inverse of X-SendFile. It parses the multipart post in C inside your apache process and writes the files to disk. Once that work is done it changes the request to look like a regular form POST which contains pointers to the temp files on disk.

Most of the problems with cookies are due to breaking visibility,

Without intending to take anything away from Roy’s (valid) criticism on labeling, REST isn’t an all or nothing proposition. One can get significant value from partial adoption.

Trample is a more flexible load simulator. Instead of a static list of urls, trample's configuration language is ruby. Using ruby's blocks (lambda functions), it's possible to randomize the requests that get made in each thread, as well as the user that logs in.

On any page accessed with SSL, all Ajax requests must use SSL, or they will fail. To make this happen, all you need to do is include the names of the actions that service the requests in your ssl_required statement.

The idea behind scrooge is both surprisingly simple and powerful: instead of forcing the developer to manually specify each attribute column, simply observe and record for some period of time all of the attribute accesses and then reuse this knowledge in the future to automatically optimize your subsequent query requests.

Deadweight is RCov for CSS, kind of. Given a set of stylesheets and a set of URLs, it determines which selectors are actually used and reports which can be "safely" deleted.