Ruby includes many standard gems that are bundled into the Ruby installation. Here is an example for the gem strscan that will be displayed as default:

gem list strscan     

*** LOCAL GEMS ***

strscan (default: 3.0.1)

It is still possible to have newer version of a gem installed beside the default version:

gem install strscan  
Fetching strscan-3.0.3.gem
Building native extensions. This could take a while...
Successfully installed strscan-3.0.3
1 gem installed

gem list strscan   

*** LOC...

In case you have trouble with the zeitwerk autoloader, you can check out the documentation Autoloading and Reloading Constants and Classic to Zeitwerk HOWTO for some debugging hints.

For myself it was useful to print the registered constants and the file references during the boot. Therefore you need to add Rails.autoloaders.log! at the end of your config/application.rb file. You could also run `bin...

With ActiveType 1.2 you can modify associations (has_many etc.) after they have been defined.

One common use case for this is to change an association inside a form model, like this:

class Credential < ActiveRecord::Base
end

class User < ActiveRecord::Base
  has_many :credentials
end

class SignUpCredential < ActiveType::Record[Credential]
end

class SignUp < ActiveType::Record[User]
  change_association :credentials, class_name: 'SignUpCredential'
end

Now, if you load `credentials...

Some pseudo-elements need to be addressed with vendor prefixes. E.g. ::selection is not supported by Firefox, you need to use ::-moz-selection instead.

What you cannot do is to define a single CSS rule to address both the standard and vendor-prefixed form:

::selection, ::-moz-selection {
  background-color: red;
}

This rule will be ignored by all browsers. The reason is that if a browser doe...

When you want to group rails models of a logical context, namespaces are your friend. However, if you have a lot of classes in the same namespace it might be tedious to specify the table name for each class seperately:

class Accounting::Invoice < ApplicationRecord
  self.table_name = 'accounting_invoices'
  ...
end

class Accounting::Payment < ApplicationRecord
  self.table_name = 'accounting_payments'
  ...
end

A replacement for the self.table_name-assignment is the table_name_prefix in the module definition:

modu...

Code quality can be measured in four levels:

0. (Working code)
1. Reliable code (minimum)
2. Readable code (ok for short-lived code)
3. Changeable code (standard level)

The code quality of a project directly impacts its maintainability.

Generally you should aim for level 3. If the code will stay for less than a few months, it may stay at level 2. Never go below level 1.

0. Working code

You have implemented that feature and it works. Congrats! You have reached level zero, which means three levels of code quality lie ahead.

First, m...

tl;dr

Since Rails 6.1+ you can use .compact_blank or .compact_blank! to remove blank values from collections (e.g. arrays).

Remove nil values from an array

['foo', nil].compact
# => ['foo']

# You can use the splat operator to ignore nil values when constructing an array
['foo', *nil]
# => ['foo']

Remove blank values from collections

Array

array = [1, "", nil, 2, " ", [], {}, false, true]

# Any Rails version
array.reject(&:blank?)
# => [1, 2, true]

# Since Rails 6.1+
array.compact_blank
# ...

CSS support in major e-mail clients is horrible.

This will give you an overview what you will not be able to use across all clients.

See also

• Designing HTML emails

When paginating records, we usually need to know the number of total records in order to render pagination links. Popular pagination libraries like will_paginate or Kaminari do this for us by simply issuing an extra query, like this:

SELECT post.* FROM posts LIMIT 20 OFFSET 100;

SELECT COUNT(*) FROM posts;   

This is fine most of the time. But rarely, you might have very complicated WHERE conditions or a subquery that takes time to run. In thes...

You can use the code below to check whether the browser can make connections to the current site:

await isOnline() // resolves to true or false

The code

The isOnline() function below checks if you can make real requests by re-fetching your site's favicon. If the favicon cannot be downloaded within 6 seconds, it considers your connection to be offline.

async function isOnline({ path, timeout } = {}) {
  if (!navigator.onLine) return false

  path ||= document.querySelect...

Ruby has two different ways to match the start and the end of a text:

• ^ (Start of line) and $ (End of line)
• \A (Start of string) and \z (End of string)

Most often you want to use \A and \z.

Here is a short example in which we want to validate the content type of a file attachment. Normally we would not expect content_type_1 to be a valid content type with the used regular expression image\/(jpeg|png). But as ^ and $ will match lines, it matches both content_type_1 and content_type_2. Using \A and \z will wo...

This note shows how to merge an ugly feature branch with multiple dirty WIP commits back into the master as one pretty commit.

Squashing commits with git rebase

What we are describing here will destroy commit history and can go wrong. For this reason, do the squashing on a separate branch:

git checkout -b squashed_feature

This way, if you screw up, you can go back to your original branch, make another branch for squashing and try again.

Tip

If you didn't make a backup branch and something ...

Somewhat regularly, you will need to filter a list down to some items and then map them to another value.

You can of course chain map and compact, or select/filter and map, but Ruby 2.7 introduced a method for this exact purpose: filter_map.

So instead of

>> [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6].map { |i| i * 2 if i.even? }.compact
=> [4, 8, 12]

or

>> [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6].select(&:even?).map { |i| i * 2 }
=> [4, 8, 12]

you can just do

>> [1,...

I recently wanted to add a model for address information but also wanted to add a unique index to those fields that is case-insensitive.
The model looked like this:

create_table :shop_locations do |t|
  t.string :street
  t.string :house_number
  t.string :zip_code
  t.string :city
  t.belongs_to :shop
end

But how to solve the uniqueness problem?

Another day, another undocumented Rails feature!

This time, it’s that ActiveRecord::Base.connection.add_index supports an undocumented option to pass a string argument as the v...

Imagine these models and associations:

class Deck < ApplicationRecord
  has_many :cards
end

class Card < ApplicationRecord
  belongs_to :deck, optional: true
end

Now you want to find all Decks without any Card or all Cards without a Deck.

Rails 6.1+

Rails 6.1 introduced a handy method ActiveRecord#missing to find records without given associations.

Deck.where.missing(:cards)

SELECT "decks".*
FROM "dec...

When changing code in mailers, updating the corresponding mailer preview can be forgotten very easily.

Mailer previews can be tested like other code as well and I sometimes add the following tests to test suites:

# Make sure to require the previews
Dir[Rails.root.join('spec/mailers/previews/*.rb')].each { |file| require(file) }


ActionMailer::Preview.all.index_with(&:emails).each do |preview, mails|
mails.each do |mail|
    describe preview do
      specify "##{mail} works" do
        expect { preview.call(mail...

When redirecting you should take care to use the right HTTP status code.

From controllers

When redirecting from a controller, the default status code is 302 Found (aka Moved Temporarily):

red...

If you have a JS fiddle, you can open it in fullscreen by appending /show to the URL.

Example: https://jsfiddle.net/b275g910/3 => https://jsfiddle.net/b275g910/3/show

When starting a project we always make a good estimate of all known requirements, and plan budgets and available developers accordingly.

Requirements change. Budgets usually don't.

To make sure a project stays on track, we update our estimates once a month and compare them to the remaining budget. If this doesn't match any more, we have to act.

To update an estimate, do the following:

• Start with the most recent estimate for the project.
• Which stories have been completed? Set their estimate to zero.
• Have any requirements cha...

Adding a gem means you take over the liability towards the external code.

Checklist

Based on "To gem, or not to gem":

• Gem is really needed (prefer writing your own code for simple requirements without many edge cases)
• Gem is tested well (coverage and quality)
• Gem has a good code quality
• Gem's licence fits to the project requirement
• Try to avoid gems that do much more than your requireme...