When you are calling a method that may raise an exception that you don't care about, you might think of doing something like this:

@user = User.power_find(something) rescue User.new

Do not do that! You will be rescuing away StandardError and all its subclasses, like NameError -- meaning that even a typo in your code won't raise an error.

Instead, rescue the exception type that you are expecting:

@user = begin
  User.power_find(something)...

When updating WebMock, be prepared that your specs may send real requests into the depths of the internet unless you update Curb as well.\
WebMock will not complain about those requests not being stubbed.

One of the commits that made it into 1.8.0 actually breaks Curb versions below 0.7.16 while fixing it for that version (and above, hopefully).\
WebMock's hooks for Curl::Easy are sti...

The handy method has_select?(field, :selected => text) does not behave as expected with Cucumber 0.10.2, Capybara 0.4.1.2 and Selenium 0.2.2. It may not recognize a select field if the selected option with the text has no value. If you don't have the possibility to upgrade these Gems, probably the best way to go is to distinguish the current Capybara driver:

Then /^"([^"]*)" should be selected for "([^"]*)"(?: within "([^\"]*)")?$/ do |value, field, selector|
  with_scope(selector) do

    # currently needed due to different behav...

When your gems complain about invalid gemspecs and illformed requirements, it is most probably an error resulting from the transition from Syck to psych. To fix this:

1. go to your gemspec directory (e.g. /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/specifications/)
2. change #<Syck::DefaultKey:0x00000100e779e8> to = (equals sign) in each file that's complaining

REST Client is a nice, simple HTTP client library for Ruby.

When you do a simple GET request like that:

RestClient.get 'http://example.com/'

it will result in this request beeing sent to www.example.com:

GET / HTTP/1.1
Accept: */*; q=0.5, application/xml
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate
Host: www.example.com

The application/xml accept header might lead to unexpected results on your server. You can force REST Client to ask the server for default text/html that way:

RestC...

Copy the attached file to config/initializers/indent_string.rb and you can say

"foo".indent(4) # "    foo"

Note you will find many simpler implementations of this method on the Interweb. They probably won't do what you want in edge cases, fuck up trailing whitespace, etc. The implementation in this card has the following behavior:

describe '#indent' do

  it 'should indent the string by the given number of spaces' do
    "foo".indent(2).should == "  foo"
  end

  it 'should indent multiple lines line by line' do

...

Imagine you have a piece of code that tries to send a request to a remote server. Now the server is temporarily not available and raises an exception. In order to re-send the request you could use the following snippet:

def remote_request
  begin
    response = RestClient.get my_request_url
  rescue RestClient::ResourceNotFound => error
    @retries ||= 0
    if @retries < @max_retries
      @retries += 1
      retry
    else
      raise error
    end
  end
  response
end

This sni...

Tooltips that are delivered through HTML attributes are encoded. Decode entities before checking for their presence.

Capybara:

Then /^there should( not)? be a(n encoded)? tooltip "([^"]*)"$/ do |negate, encoded, tooltip|
  tooltip = HTMLEntities.new.encode(tooltip) if encoded
  Then "I should#{negate} see \"#{tooltip}\" in the HTML"
end

Note

This step uses the htmlentities gem described in another card.

Ma...

Sometimes it might be helpful to have a version history for a gem, e.g. when you want to see if there is a newer Rails 2 version of your currently used gem.

At first you should search your gem at RubyGems. Example: will_paginate version history.

The "Tags" tab at GitHub might be helpful as well.

ProgressBar is a simple Ruby library for displaying progress of long-running tasks on the console. It is intended to be as simple to use as possible.

The following snippet demonstrates how you could create excel files (with spreadsheet gem) and format columns so that they follow a specific number format like currencies or dates do.

require 'rubygems'
require 'spreadsheet'

Spreadsheet.client_encoding = 'UTF-8'

book = Spreadsheet::Workbook.new
sheet1 = book.create_worksheet :name => 'test'

money_format = Spreadsheet::Format.new :number_format => "#,##0.00 [$€-407]"
date_format = Spreadsheet::Format.new :num...

This describes all the steps you'll need to get Solr up and running for your project using the Sunspot gem.

Prepare Sunspot on your development machine

What you want in your Gemfile:

gem 'sunspot_rails'
gem 'sunspot_solr'
gem 'progress_bar' # for sunspot:solr:reindex

Now define what should be indexed within Solr from your ActiveRecord models, e.g.,

class Article << ActiveRecord::Base

  searchable do
    text :title
 ...

Gem to get Rails 3's new ActiveRecord query interface (where, order) and the new scope syntax (chaining scope definitions) in Rails 2.

You also get #to_sql for scopes.

Gem to get Ruby 1.9 features in Ruby 1.8.

Code coverage for Ruby 1.9 with a powerful configuration library and automatic merging of coverage across test suites.

Note that rcov won't ever have support for Ruby 1.9, you're supposed to use rcov for 1.8 and simplecov for 1.9.

Sometimes you want one distinct version of RubyGems to be installed to replicate the same behavior across multiple servers.

Usually would do this to update your RubyGems, but this always takes you to the latest version:

gem update --system

While there are ways around the interwebs that use the rubygems-update package and call its setup.rb, there is an undocumented switch you can use:

gem update --system 1.3.7

This updates to the given version, 1.3.7 in the above case, by walking the rubygems-update package way itself.

---...

This note summarizes the ruby exception hierarchy.

Exception
  NoMemoryError
  ScriptError
    LoadError
    NotImplementedError
    SyntaxError
  SignalException
    Interrupt
      Timeout::Error    # < ruby 1.9.2
  StandardError         # caught by rescue (default if no type was specified)
    ArgumentError
    IOError
      EOFError
    IndexError
    LocalJumpError
    NameError
      NoMethodError
    Ran...

Our gitpt script to generate git commits from Pivotal Tracker stories has been tweaked and polished and is now part of the geordi gem.

Install the freshly released version 0.7 now:

gem install geordi

This update will bring you commit with an initial "setup wizard" (that asks for your PT API key and initials) and prettier output: stories are colored by their state and thos...

Using .downcase or .upcase on strings containing umlauts does not work as expected in Ruby versions before 2.4. It leaves the umlauts unchanged:

"Über".downcase
=> "Über"

"Ärger".downcase
=> "Ärger"

The very same applies for french accents (Thanks Guillaume!):

"Être ou ne pas être, telle est la question".downcase
=> "Être ou ne pas être, telle est la question"

Obviously, this leads to problems when comparing strings:

"Über".downcase == "über"
=> false

In Rails you can use ActiveSupports' [multib...

When selecting records in a date range, take care not to do it like this:

start_date = Date.parse('2007-05-01')
end_date = Date.parse('2007-05-31')
LogItem.where(:created_at => start_date .. end_date)

The problem is that created_at is a datetime (or Time in Ruby), while start_date and end_date are simple dates. In order to make sense of your query, your database will cast your dates to datetimes where the time component is 00:00:00. Because of this the query above will lose records created from `2007-05-31 00:00:0...

Note: capistrano_colors was merged into Capistrano starting from v2.13.5. However, this requires Ruby 1.9+.

If you cannot upgrade Capistrano to 2.13.5+ (e.g. because you're still running on Ruby 1.8), simply put capistrano_colors into your Gemfile and require 'capistrano_colors' in your config/deploy.rb file.

Ruby bindings for Sundown, a fast and full-featured Markdown parser that lets you define renders for arbitrary output formats.

Guide to writing CLI scripts in Ruby that play nice with pipe chains.