Capistrano 3 is a major rework of the framework and requires several adjustments to your deploy configuration files. The biggest change is that they moved away from their custom DSL and use Rake instead. For connecting with and operating on the servers, they bring a new gem SSHKit which does the heavy lifting. It's SSHKit's DSL that is used anywhere inside the Rake tasks. See #Resources at the bottom for examples.

Step 1: Upgrade guide

For migration from 2 to 3, follow this tutorial: [Capistrano 3 Upgrade Guide](https://semaphorec...

When using Savon to connect a SOAP API, you may want to use Savon::SpecHelper to mock requests in your tests as described in their documentation.

When sending a message body, the savon mock object requires a message to be set, like this:

savon.expects(:action_name).with(message: { user_id: 123 }).returns('<some xml>')

If you want to stub only the returned XML and do not care about request arguments, you can not omit with as Savon's helper will complain:

savo...

Jasmine has a jasmine.clock() helper that you can use to travel through time and trigger setTimeout and setInterval callbacks:

beforeEach(function() {
  timerCallback = jasmine.createSpy("timerCallback");
  jasmine.clock().install();
});

afterEach(function() {
  jasmine.clock().uninstall();
});

it("causes a timeout to be called", function() {
  setTimeout(function() {
    timerCallback();
  }, 100);

  expect(timerCallba...

You might wonder about this request in your test.log:

Started GET "/__identify__" for 127.0.0.1 at 2015-04-29 18:00:02 +0100

This is what happens: For drivers like Selenium, Capybara will boot up a Thin or Webrick server in a separate thread. It then makes a GET request to /__identify__ to see if the server is ready to accept requests.

Since you don't have a route that responds to /__identify, Capybara will wrap your Rails app in...

When you want to UPDATE a table with information from an associated table, you can JOIN the associated table into the statement.

Example

Let's say you have a database schema where an Employee belongs_to :department:

+-----------------+
| Employee        |                   +------------+
|-----------------| n               1 | Department |
| email           |-------------------|------------+
| department_id   |                   | name       |
+-----------------+                   +------------+

Because of perfo...

Several Rails migration methods accept index: true as an option to create an index. In some cases (like #add_column), this option is silently discarded. Know what you are doing, or use #add_index instead.

Example

Consider the following migration.

class CreateExamples < ActiveRecord::Migration
  def change
    create_table :examples do |t|
      t.references :category, index: true
      t.boolean :positive, index: true
      t.integer :number_of_participants, index: true
    end

    add_reference :examples, :user, index: tr...

jquery-placeholder is a simple jQuery plugin that enables form placeholders in browsers that do not support them natively, i.e. IE < 10.

Properties

• Works in IE6.
• Automatically checks whether the browser natively supports the HTML5 placeholder attribute for input and textarea elements. If this is the case, the plugin won’t do anything. If @placeholder is only supported for input elements, the plugin will leave those alone and apply to textareas exclusively. (This is the case for Safari 4, Opera 11.00, and possibly other browsers.)
  ...

TL;DR Under certain circumstances, dynamically defined symbols may break keyword arguments in Ruby 2.2. This was fixed in Ruby 2.2.3 and 2.3.

Specifically, when …

• there is a method with several keyword arguments and a double-splat argument (e.g. def m(foo: 'bar, option: 'will be lost', **further_options))
• there is a dynamically created Symbol (e.g. 'culprit'.to_sym) that is created before the method is parsed
• the method gets called with both the option and a culprit keyword argument

… then the `optio...

It is a common misunderstanding that all [op]=-operators work the same way, but actually they don't.

||= and &&=

Those are special cases, because the assignment will only happen if the first variable passes the check (false or nil for || and true for &&).

a ||= b   # => a || (a = b)
a &&= b   # => a && (a = b)

But still, if reading a has any side effects, they will take place regardless of to what a resolves.

Other [op]=

Assignment will always take place, no matter the value of a.

When using send_file (for example for attachments of any kind), make sure your application knows the correct mime types so that all browsers can handle the files. It is much more convenient for users if they can decide to open a file directly instead of having to save it first.

For Rails >= 3.2

Simply put your mime types in config/initializers/mime_types.rb. send_file will take care of everything else.

For Rails < 3.2

Put your mime types in config/initializers/mime_types.rb. Additionally, tell send_file to use them (for ex...

In RSpec you can tag examples or example groups with any tags you like simply by saying

describe ReportCreator, slow: true do
  # ..
end

describe ReportCreator do
  it 'generates reports', slow: true do
    # ...
  end
end

You can then only run examples with these tags.

rspec --tag slow
rspec -t slow

# Using the parallel_tests gem
rake "parallel:spec[,,--tag slow]"

Or you can run all examples except the ones with a certain tag:

rspec --tag ~slow # note the ~
rspec -t ~slow

# Using the parallel_tests gem
r...

If you want to grow a Ruby Array, you might find out about #fill but it is not really what you are looking for. [1]
For arrays of unknown size that you want to grow or shrink to a fixed size, you need to define something yourself. Like the following.

Array.class_eval do

  def in_size(expected_size, fill_with = nil)
    sized = self[0, expected_size]
    sized << fill_with while sized.size < expected_size
    sized
  end

end

Use it like this:

>> [1, 2, 3].in_size(5)
=> [1, 2, 3, nil, nil]

...

Bad

# Given the following models

class Image < ActiveRecord::Base
  has_many :album_images
  has_many :albums, through: :album_images
end

class Album < ActiveRecord::Base
  has_many :album_images
  has_many :images, through: :album_images
end

# Join model
class AlbumImage < ActiveRecord::Base
  belongs_to :album
  belongs_to :image
end

Destroying a record in this setup will only remove the record itself, and leave orphaned join records behind.

image = Image.last
image.destroy # removes only the `image` record,
   ...

To use a form model with devise, you can simply override #resource_class in a controller. A typical use case would be the registrations controller, as users will need some fields only on sign-up. Example:

class Frontend::Authentication::RegistrationsController < Devise::RegistrationsController

  private

  def resource_class
    FrontendUser::AsSignUp # my decorator class, extending from FrontendUser
  end

end

Fontawesome 4 has introduced new naming conventions that make it easy to retrieve variants of a given icon.

The format is:

fa-[name]-[alt]-[shape]-[o]-[direction]

Note that this is a naming convention which doesn't imply there's an icon for any combination of tags.

name

The name of the icon, e.g. comment, print, bookmark etc. See the full list.

alt

An alternative icon.

shape

The icon inside a circle or square.

o

An outlined ...

Starting from Rails 4.0, you can use a special form options helper called #collection_check_boxes. It behaves similar to #collection_select, but instead of a single select field it renders a checkbox and a label for each item in the collection.

= form_for @post do |form|
  = form.collection_check_boxes :author_ids, Author.all, :id, :name_with_initial

How generated form params look like
---------------------------------...

When ending a Selenium test Capybara resets the browser state by closing the tab, clearing cookies, localStorage, etc.

It may be a good idea to wait for all in-flight AJAX requests to finish before ending a scenario:

• You may have client-side JavaScript that freaks out when the tab closure kills their pending requests. If that JavaScript opens an error alert or spams errors to the console, your test may fail after the last step.
• With unlucky timing the server may receive an AJAX request as the browser tab closes, causing a connection ...

• Now supports RSpec 3 and Rails 4
• Drops support for state_machine, which has some issues with Rails 4 and isn't actively maintained

Web applications can be used by multiple users at the same time. A typical application server like Passenger has multiple worker processes for a single app. In a distributed deployment setup like we use at makandra you will even have multiple application servers, each with their own worker pool.

This means that your code needs to deal with concurrent data access. The two main tools we use to cope with concurrency are database transactions and distributed locks. These two are not interchangeable. You ca...

RSpec 3 has verifying doubles. This breed of mock objects check that any methods being stubbed are present on an instance of a given class. They also check methods aren't called with the wrong number of arguments.

This dual approach allows you to move very quickly and test components in isolation, while
giving you confidence that your doubles are not a complete fiction.

You should always prefer using a verifying double to using an old-school mock...

What if a complicated component comes along that is naturally modeled by multiple directives? This group of directives, as a whole, form a single self contained component. None of directives in the group can stand alone because they only make sense when used together; they collaborate; they are aware of each other and need to communicate with each other.

This post will discuss best practices for managing communication among collaborating directives and illustrate these practices with an example.

Here's a pretty useful steps that hasn't made it into Spreewald yet.

It is best used with the auto-mapper for BEM classes in features/support/selectors.rb

When I hover above [selector] element

When /^I hover above (.*) element$/ do |selector|
  page.find(selector_for(selector)).hover
end

Example:

When I hover above the album's image element

→ triggers a hover event on .album--image

You can hook into Slack when using Capistrano for deployment. The slackistrano gem does most of the heavy lifting for you. Its default messages are unobtrusive and can be adjusted easily.

When deploying, it posts to a Slack channel like this:

How to integrate

Integrating Slackistrano with Capistrano 3 is fairly simple.

1. In your Slack, open menu → A...

Often times you want to give a bunch of elements the same style, except for the last. For example borders or margins.

You probably commonly used the :last-child CSS meta selector like so:

.foo {
  border-bottom: 1px dashed #000;
}
.foo:last-child {
  border-bottom-width: 0;
}

However, this only works when an element is the last child of its parent. Any other siblings which are unrelated to your case will break it.

Instead, prefer using the + sibling selector. It applies to the element following the other.

.foo + .foo {
 ...