Rails asset pipeline: Why relative paths can work in development, but break in production
The problem
When using the asset pipeline your assets (images, javascripts, stylesheets, fonts) live in folders inside app
:
app/assets/fonts
app/assets/images
app/assets/javascripts
app/assets/stylesheets
With the asset pipeline, you can use the full power of Ruby to generate assets. E.g. you can have ERB tags in your Javascript. Or you can have an ERB template which generates Haml which generates HTML. You can chain as many preprocessors as you want.
When you deploy, Rails runs assets:precompile
...
How to make RubyMine aware of Cucumber steps defined in gems
If your Ruby project includes a gem like Spreewald that comes with some external step definition, RubyMine does not know about them by default and will highlight the step as an undefined reference:
To link these external step definitions to RubyMine, add the corresponding gems to your RubyMine-Settings:
- Go to Settings (
ctrl + alt + s
) - Go to Languages and Frameworks
- Go to Cucumber
- There, add your gem (e.g "spreewald") via the little "+" from the b...
RSpec: How to define classes for specs
RSpec allows defining methods inside describe
/context
blocks which will only exist inside them.
However, classes (or any constants, for that matter) will not be affected by this. If you define them in your specs, they will exist globally. This is because of how RSpec works (short story: instance_eval
).
describe Notifier do
class TestRecord
# ...
end
let(:record) { TestRecord.new }
it { ... }
end
# TestRecord will exist here, outside of the spec!
This will come bite you at least when you try to define a ...
Flexbox: How to prevent <pre> elements from overflowing
I recently had the problem that embedded code boxes crashed my layout.
It turned out that pre
s break out of their containers when using them inside a deeper nested flex layout.
For me it was a flex inside a flex item (fleXzibit).
<div class="flex">
<div class="flex-item">
...
<div class="nested-flex">
<div class="nested-flex-item">
<pre>A code example</pre>
</div>
</div>
...
</div>
</div>
The reason is that flexbox items default to `mi...
JavaScript: New Features in ES2021
tl;dr
With ES2021 you now can use
str.replaceAll()
,Promise.any()
, logical assignment operators, numeric separators andWeakRef
on all major browsers except IE11.
replaceAll
JavaScript's replace(searchValue, replaceValueOrFn)
by default replaces only the first match of a given String or RegExp.
When supplying a RegExp as the searchValue argument, you can specify the g
("global") modifier, but you have to remember doing that, hence using replace
when you expect global replacement is prone to errors.
When supplying st...
Rails: How to write custom email interceptors
Nowadays it is fairly easy to intercept and modify mails globally before they are sent. All you have to do is register an interceptor class which responds to .delivering_email(message)
. This card will show you two common use cases.
Subject prefix:
Usually you want to prefix the subject line of emails with the current environment (except production) so you can differentiate between production mails and mails from other environments. Of course a...
Inspect the page content in a Cucumber session
When you need to see the content of a page (i.e. not all the HTML but the relevant text body)
- you can do
pp (html_content)
- pp will format the html String human readable pretty printed
- where html_content can be replaced by one of the following commands:
Rails
body
or response.body
Capybara:
page.driver.html.content
page.body
Webrat:
Nokogiri::HTML(response.body).content
The returned strings can be cleaned up by calling .gsub(/^\s*$/, '').squeeze("\n")
on them.\
Although this may be useful for d...
Use DatabaseCleaner with multiple test databases
There is a way to use multiple databases in Rails.
You may have asked yourself how you're able to keep your test databases clean, if you're running multiple databases with full read and write access at the same time. This is especially useful when migrating old/existing databases into a new(er) one.
Your database.yml
may look like this:
default: &default
adapter: postgresql
encoding: unicode
username: <%= ENV['DATABASE_USER'] %>
host: <%= ENV['DATABASE...
ActiveRecord: Query Attributes
tl;dr
You can useattribute?
as shorthanded version ofattribute.present?
, except for numeric attributes and associations.
Technical Details
attribute?
is generated for all attributes and not only for boolean attributes.
These methods are using #query_attribute
under the hood. For more details you can see ActiveRecord::AttributeMethods::Query
.
In most circumstances query_attribute
is working like attribute.present?
. If your attribute is responding to :zero?
then you have to be aware that `query_attri...
How to bind an event listener only once with Unpoly
You can use Unpoly's up.on with a named listener function and immediately unbind this event listener with { once: true }
:
up.on('up:fragment:inserted', { once: true }, function () { ... })
In Unpoly 1 you can immediately unregister the listener with up.off:
up.on('up:fragment:inserted', function fragmentInsertedCallback() {
up.off('up:fragment:inserted', fragmentInsertedCallback)
// ... code for the callback function, which should run only once
})
Exam...
Gem development: recommended gem metadata
The gemspec for gems allows to add metadata to your gem, some of which have a special meaning and are helpful for users.
You can provide links to your Github bugtracker or changelog file that are then used on the rubygems page of your gem (in the sidebar, e.g. see gem page of consul).
Here are some keys that should be filled:
Gem::Specification.new do |s|
s.name = 'my-gem'
s.homepage = 'https://github.com/makandra/my-gem'
s.metadata = {
'source_code_uri' => s.homepage,
'bug_tracker...
Bookmarklet to generate a Pivotal Tracker story from Zammad Ticket
This is a bookmarklet you can add to Chrome or Firefox which will allow you to create a story in Pivotal Tracker from a Zammad ticket. This might come in handy when creating stories for SWAT Teams.
But first you will have to set two variables in the script below:
-
pt_project_id
: the ID of the Pivotal Tracker Project you want to add stories to. This can be found as part of the URL of the project (https://www.pivotaltracker.com/n/projects/<pt_project_id>
) -
pt_token
: the Pivotal Tracker token used for authentication. Can be found in y...
Chrome DevTools: List Registered Event Listeners
In Chrome DevTools you can use getEventListeners(object)
to get a list of registered event listeners on the specified object.
You can also do this without the console, by selecting an element in the DOM inspector. In the element details, select the tab Event Listeners".
Example
const registry = getEventListeners(document)
registry['up-click']
// 0: { useCapture: false, passive: false, once: false, type: 'up:click', listener: ƒ }
// 1: { useCapture: false, passive: false, once: false, type: 'up:click', listener: ƒ }
//...
How to get information about a gem (via CLI or at runtime from Ruby)
When you need information about a gem (like version(s) or install path(s)), you can use the gem
binary from the command line, or the Gem
API inside a ruby process at runtime.
gem
binary (in a terminal)
You can get some information about a gem by running gem info <gem name>
in your terminal.
Example:
$ gem info irb
*** LOCAL GEMS ***
irb (1.4.1, 1.3.5)
Author: Keiju ISHITSUKA
Homepage: https://github.com/ruby/irb
Licenses: Ruby, BSD-2-Clause
Installed at (1.4.1): /home/arne/.rbenv/versions/3.0.3/lib/ruby/g...
RSpec: Expect one of multiple matchers to match
RSpec let's you chain a matcher with .or
. The expectation will then pass if at least one matcher matches:
expect(color).to eq("red").or eq("green")
Real-world example
A real-world use case would be to test if the current page has a button with the label "Foo". There are many ways to render a button with CSS:
<input type="button" value="Foo">
<input type="submit" value="Foo">
<button>Foo</button>
We cannot express it with a single have_css()
matcher, since we need the { text: 'Foo' }
optio...
Before you make a merge request: Checklist for common mistakes
Merge requests are often rejected for similar reasons.
To avoid this, before you send a merge request, please confirm that your code ...
- has been reviewed by yourself beforehand
- fulfills every requirement defined as an acceptance criterion
- does not have any log or debugging statements like
console.log(...)
,byebug
etc. - has green tests
- has tests...
Thread-safe collections in Ruby
When using threads, you must make your code thread-safe. This can be done by either locking (mutexes) all data shared between threads, or by only using immutable data structures. Ruby core classes like String
or Array
are not immutable.
There are several gems providing thread-safe collection classes in Ruby.
concurrent-ruby
The concurrent-ruby gem provides thread-safe versions of Array
and Hash
:
sa = Concurrent::Array.new # supports standard Array.new forms
sh = Co...
JavaScript: Working with Query Parameters
tl;dr: Use the URLSearchParams
API to make your live easier if you want to get or manipulate query parameters (URL parameters).
URLSearchParams
API
The URLSearchParams
API is supported in all major browsers except IE 11.
It offers you a bunch of useful methods:
-
URLSearchParams.append()
- appends a query parameter -
URLSearchParams.delete()
- deletes the specified query parameter -
URLSearchParams.get()
- returns the value of the specified query parameter - `URLSearchP...
Faking and testing the network with WebMock
An alternative to this technique is using VCR. VCR allows you to record and replay real HTTP responses, saving you the effort to stub out request/response cycles in close details. If your tests do require close inspection of requests and responses, Webmock is still the way.
WebMock is an alternative to FakeWeb when testing code that uses the network. You sh...
ActionMailer: Previewing mails directly in your email client
In Rails, we usually have a mailer setup like this:
class MyMailer < ActionMailer::Base
def newsletter
mail to: 'receiver@host.tld',
from: 'sender@host.tld',
subject: 'My mail'
end
end
If you want to preview your mail in the browser, you can use the Action Mailer Preview. To inspect the mail directly in your email client, just create an .eml
file and open it with your client:
mail = MyMailer.newsletter
Fil...
Jasmine: Fixing common errors during initialization
Due to the way we setup Jasmine tests in our projects, you may run into various errors when Jasmine boots.
Setting jasmineRequire
on undefined
Jasmine 4 may fail with an error like this:
Uncaught TypeError: Cannot set properties of undefined (setting 'jasmineRequire')
This is due to issues in Jasmine's [environment detection](https://github.com/jasmine/jasmine/blob/502cb24bb89212917a3c943b593fd918ffc481cb/lib/jasmine-core/...
Components: Dynamically growing input field's height to fit content
Sometimes you will need an input field which wraps content and grows in height as soon as content gets longer than the input fields width.
There is no way to get a "normal" string input field to wrap as desired, but there are other ways.
Here is one pretty easy solution to get what you want:
Step 1
Let your input became a text area with one row.
f.text_area(:name, rows: 1, autosize: '')
Step 2
Include the autosize library in your project
yarn add autosize
And make your...
Casting ActiveRecord scopes or instances to ActiveType extended model classes
When working with ActiveType you will often find it useful to cast an ActiveRecord instance to its extended ActiveType::Record
variant.
Starting with active_type 0.4.0 you can use ActiveType.cast
for this:
class User < ActiveRecord::Base
...
end
class SignUp < ActiveType::Record[User]
...
end
user = User.find(1)
sign_up = ActiveType.cast(user, SignUp)
sign_up.is_a?(SignUp) # => true
This is basically like [ActiveRecord#becomes
](http://apidock.com/rails/v4.2.1/ActiveRecord/...
Jasmine: Testing if two arrays contain the same elements
When the order matters:
expect(array1).toEqual(array2)
Regardless of order:
expect(array1).toEqual(jasmine.arrayWithExactContents(array2))
Ignoring extra elements:
expect(array1).toEqual(jasmine.arrayContaining(array2))