Caution: `.includes` can make `.ids` non-unique.
This can happen with a very simple model:
class Note
has_many :attachments
end
Everything looks normal:
Note.all.to_a.size # => 8
Note.all.ids.size # => 8
Then .includes leads to weird results:
Note.all.includes(:attachments).to_a.size # => 8
Note.all.includes(:attachments).ids.size # => 12
If a note has 5 attachments, its id will be included 5 times.
With .preload it works as expected:
Note.all.preload(:attachments).to_a.size # => 8
Note.all.preload(:attachments).ids.size # => 8
Note
I crea...
How to mount a legacy database to migrate data
There are many approaches out there how you can import data from a legacy application to a new application. Here is an approach which opens two database connections and uses active record for the legacy system, too:
1. Add you database information to you config/database.yml.
data_migration:
database: your_application_data_migration
2. Create a separate application record for the data migration, e.g. in app/data_migration/migration_record.rb. You will need to create an app/data_migration.rb class first.
class DataMig...
Nicer alternatives to def_delegator or def_delegators
Delegating methods to other objects is often helpful but the syntax of both def_delegators and def_delegator is a complete mess that makes your code hard to read.
Consider these classes:
class Topic < ActiveRecord::Base
def title
"A title"
end
def category
"Topic category"
end
end
class Post < ActiveRecord::Base
belongs_to :topic
def_delegato...
Linux Performance Analysis in 60,000 Milliseconds
You login to a Linux server with a performance issue: what do you check in the first minute?
uptime
dmesg | tail
vmstat 1
mpstat -P ALL 1
pidstat 1
iostat -xz 1
free -m
sar -n DEV 1
sar -n TCP,ETCP 1
top
Also see:
New Firefox and gem versions for our Selenium testing environment (Ubuntu 14.04+)
Firefox 5.0.1, which we were using for most Rails 2.3 projects, does not run on Ubuntu 14.04 any more. Here is how to update affected projects.
-
Update (or create)
.firefox-versionwith the content:24.0
If you haven't installed Firefox 24 yet, the next time you run tests with Geordi, it will tell you how to install it. -
On a Rails 2 project:
-
Update your Cucumber-related gems as described in Upgrading Cucumber and Capybara, including
cucumber_spinnerandlaunchy. -
If you...
-
Pimp my IRB
Put the attached files into your home directory and enjoy.
.irbrc
- defines
interesting_methods, which is essentially all methods without top-level methods inherited from Object/Module - requires
awesome_print, if present - requires
interactive_editor, if present (basically makes vim available) - loads .irbrc_rails if in Rails (e.g. for the Rails console)
.irbrc_rails
- defines
efind(email), which is a shortcut to find users by email
...
Designing HTML emails
The 90s are calling: they want their tables back. Unfortunately, you need them all for laying out your HTML emails.
Email client HTML rendering is way more scattered than browser HTML. While you might have a pretty good understanding of what features and patterns you can use to support all major browsers, I doubt anyone masters this craft for HTML email clients.
The only way to ensure your email looks good (acceptable, at least) in all mail clients, is to check it. Litmus is your go-to solution for this (see below). W...
HTML emails with inline stylesheets and webpacker
Many mail clients do not support external style sheets. Some even require all styling inline, which means you'll have to do your styling inline. For Rails applications, you can use Roadie or premailer, which lets you keep your well-structured CSS files and do the inlining for you.
Since Roadie is now in passive maintenance mode, we go with premailer:
Include premailer in your Gemfile:
gem 'premailer-ra...
Fix „command failed: /usr/bin/wkhtmltopdf ...“ using PDFKit middleware
Ubuntu 12.04 LTS x64, Ruby 1.8.7, Rails 2.13, PDFKit 0.5.4, Phusion Passenger Apache 2
I ran into this, when I started using passenger to deal with the Single Thread Issue which caused my webrick to deadlock when an ActionController::RoutingError (No route matches "...") occurred.
These steps brought me a little further
(1) assert dependencies are installed
sudo aptitude install openssl build-essential xorg libssl-dev
(2) only for 64bits OS Run one by one the follo...
How to use Haml in your helpers
You know those helper methods that just render some HTML but look weird because of content_tags all over the place? You could also use Haml instead.
Example
Consider the following helper.
def greeting
message = ''.html_safe
message << 'Welcome to '
message << content_tag(:span, Rails.env, class: 'greeting--location')
content_tag :div, message, class: 'greeting'
end
That looks clumsy and is hard to read.
Wouldn't it be nicer to say something like this?
def greeting
render_haml <<-HAML
...
Split an array into groups
Given group size
If you would like to split a Ruby array into pairs of two, you can use the Rails ActiveSupport method in_groups_of:
>> [1, 2, 3, 4].in_groups_of(2)
=> [[1, 2], [3, 4]]
>> [1, 2, 3, 4, 5].in_groups_of(2)
=> [[1, 2], [3, 4], [5, nil]]
>> [1, 2, 3, 4, 5].in_groups_of(2, 'abc')
=> [[1, 2], [3, 4], [5, 'abc']]
>> [1, 2, 3, 4, 5].in_groups_of(2, false)
=> [[1, 2], [3, 4], [5]]
Given group cou...
Use a Bash function to alias the rake command to Spring binstubs or "bundle exec" fallback
There are different ways to run rake:
- On Rails 4.1+ projects, you have Spring and its binstubs which dramatically improve boot-up time for Rake and similar. You need to run
bin/raketo use them. - On older projects, you want to run "bundle exec rake" to avoid those ugly "already activated rake x.y.z" errors that hit you when different rake versions are installed for your current Ruby.
Here is a solution that gives you a plain rake command which uses a binstubbed bin/rake if available and falls back to bundle exec rake if necessar...
Open a MySQL shell using credentials from database.yml
In order to open a MySQL shell without the need to enter user and password, you can say the following in any Rails 2 project:
script/dbconsole -p
In Rails 3 you can say:
rails dbconsole -p
If you'd like to enter a database for an environment other than development you can say:
script/dbconsole -p staging
IRB's multi-line autocomplete and how to disable it
Recent IRB versions include a multi-line autocomplete which may be helpful to novice users but can be distracting.
Cycling through options works by pressing the Tab key (as usual), and for some methods you also get some kind of documentation, though the quality of results is usually not on par with your IDE of choice.
I have found that it also slows down my IRB in some cases, or that pressing the Backspace key does not always reliably remove characters, which I find more annoying than useful.
You may disable multi-line autocomplete by
- ...
Edge Rider: Power tools for ActiveRecord scopes
In our continued quest to extract proven code snippets from makandropedia into tested and upgradable gems, we have released Edge Rider.
Edge Rider was created with two intents:
- Provides a number of utility methods to facilitate hardcore work with scopes.
- Provide a stable API for working with scopes across multiple versions of Rails, since Rails has a tradition of breaking details of its scope API every other release.
The gem bundles multiple patches and initializers we've been using for hard...
Postgres: How to force database sessions to terminate
If another session is accessing your database you are trying to reset or drop you might have seen the following error:
PG::ObjectInUse: ERROR: database "foo_development" is being accessed by other users
DETAIL: There is 1 other session using the database.
This could be the rails server, rubymine and many more. Beside terminating the session connection manually you can also find out the pid and kill the process.
1. rails db
2. SELECT * FROM pg_stat_activity;
datid | 98359
datname | foo_developm...
Ruby constant lookup: The good, the bad and the ugly
In Ruby, classes and modules are called constants. This card explains how Ruby resolves the meaning of a constant.
The good
E. g. in the following example, Array could mean either Foo::Array or simply Array:
class Foo
def list
Array.new
end
end
What Ruby does here is to see if the name Array makes sense inside of Foo::, and if that fails, resolves it to ::Array (without a namespace).
The bad
This is relevant for old Ruby versions. Ruby 2.5+ removes top-level constant lookup whi...
NoMethodError: undefined method `cache' for Gem:Module
I got this error when running Rails 2.3 tests for Rails LTS. More stacktrace:
NoMethodError: undefined method `cache' for Gem:Module
/vagrant/rails-2-3-lts-repository/railties/lib/rails_generator/lookup.rb:212:in `each'
/vagrant/rails-2-3-lts-repository/railties/lib/rails_generator/lookup.rb:146:in `to_a'
/vagrant/rails-2-3-lts-repository/railties/lib/rails_generator/lookup.rb:146:in `cache'
/opt/vagrant_ruby/lib/ruby/1.8/fileutils.rb:243:in `inject'
/vagrant/rails-2-3-lts-repository/railties/l...
Stub a request's IP address in a Cucumber scenario
The solution in this card is based on a stack overflow post by Leventix.
If you need to make request come from a fixed IP address for the duration of a Cucumber scenario, the code below lets you write this:
Given my IP address is 188.174.117.205
Rails 3
Given /^my IP address is "(.*?)"$/ do |ip|
ActionDispatch::Request.any_instance.stub(:remote_ip).and_return(ip)
end
Rails 2
-----...
How to fix: "rake db:rollback" does not work
When you run rake db:rollback and nothing happens, you are probably missing the latest migration file (or have not migrated yet).
$ rake db:rollback
$
If that happens to you, check your migration status.
$ rake db:migrate:status
up 20160503143434 Create users
up 20160506134137 Create pages
up 20160517112656 Migrate pages to page versions
up 20160518112023 ********** NO FILE **********
When you tell Rails to roll back, it tries to roll back the latest change that was mi...
How to silence "I18n.enforce_available_locales" deprecation warnings
Before Rails 3.2.14, when supplying an invalid locale to I18n, it would fall back to its config.i18n.default_locale (which is :en by default). Eventually, this will be changed to raise an error by default -- for now, it shows a deprecation warning.
Since Rails 3.2.14 and 3.2.15 did not include security updates, you might not have applied them and probably now encounter these deprecation warnings after upgrading to 3.2.16 (or 4.0.2):
[deprecated] I...
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...
Spreewald 4.3.3 released
Field error steps
Spreewald's The ... field should have an error and The ... field should have the error ... steps now have built-in support for Rails and Bootstrap (v3-v5) error classes. When using Bootstrap, it is no longer necessary to overwrite the steps in your project.
At the same time, support for formtastic has been removed as there were no real use cases. Due to that, no breaking change was introduced, as the amount of users affected by this should be zero (it was neither in the documentation nor tested).
Users may now add...
Email validation regex
There is a practical short list for valid/invalid example email addresses - Thanks to Florian L.! The definition for valid emails (RFC 5322) can be unhandy for some reasons, though.
Since Ruby 2.3, Ruby's URI lib provides a built-in email regex URI::MailTo::EMAIL_REGEXP. That's the best solution to work with.
/\A[a-zA-Z0-9.!\#$%&'*+\/=?^_`{|}~-]+@[a-zA-Z0-9](?:[...