Yesterday, there was a blog post entitled “What the Hell is Happening to Rails” that stayed at the number one spot on Hacker News for quite a while. The post and many (but not most) the comments on the post reflect deep-seated concern about the recent direction of Rails. Others have addressed the core question about change in the framework, but I’d like to address questions about specific changes that came up in the post and comments.

I pushed a new version of the Cucumber Factory gem. This new release lets you refer to a previously created record by any string attribute:

Given there is a movie with the title "Before Sunrise"
And there is a movie with the title "Limitless"
And there is a movie with the prequel "Before Sunrise"

Note how we didn't have to explicitly give the prequel a name in the example above. This is still possible, but will rarely be necessary now:

Given "Before Sunrise" is a movie with...

When using the resource_controller gem you often hook onto events like this:
update.before do
do_something
end

For testing such things in your controller you should -- as always -- not trigger something that eventually calls the thing you want.\
Instead, in your specs, have resource_controller run those hooks like it does itself. Like that:

describe 'before update' do
 ...

I found a nice script on crazylittlehacks and modified it slightly. Put the attachment to /usr/local/bin, chmod +x and run it like this:

tab

You may also pass a command that will be run in that newly opened tab:

tab ruby script/server

Note: This does not play too nice with Visor, because Visor will always be "window 1" for AppleScript. By modifying the script and replacing in window 1 with `in window...

Copy the attached Ruby code to config/initializers, or paste it into your IRB console. You can now dump any two-dimensional array to an Excel .xls spreadsheet with a single method call:

table = [['user', 'email', 'hours']]
User.all.each do |user|
  table << [user.name, user.email, user.hours]
end

table.dump_to_excel('users.xls')

The first row in the array will be dumped as the table head in bold type.

You need the spreadsheet gem in your Gemfile.

Note that there is a [limit of 65535 rows](https://makandracard...

When running an executable, ALWAYS use bundle exec. In some cases, running executables without bundle exec may work, if the executable happens to be installed in your system and does not pull in any gems that conflict with your bundle. However, this is unreliable and is the source of considerable pain. Even if it looks like it works, it may not work in the future or on another machine. 

When your cucumber features grow massively over time, the test execution can take a lot of time.
One easy way to speed up your test execution is to use the parallel_tests gem.
It comes along with some useful rake tasks that let you setup your local test environment shortly to run your features, specs or unit-tests in parallel.

Follow these steps to get it to work.

1. Add the parallel_tests gem to your Gemfile test sections like that:

   # ./Gemfile
   
   group :development, :test do
   

...

Soon after having written our shell-for script, we wanted to easily get dumps of our productions machines, too. This is how we do it:

dump-for staging [-s]

It will copy the dump to your project's tmp directory and name it according to the capistrano stage you're calling for, here: staging.dump. When you pass the optional -s option, the dump will automatically been sourced into your local development database.

This script ...

After having written useful scripts into makandra notes for a long time, we’ve now tied them into a powerful new gem: geordi.

It gives you the power to

• get a dump from your production database with dump-for production
• install your local gems to the production machine with install-gems-remotely
• execute rake tasks to several environments at the same time with power-rake db:migrate
• and much more

Check it out from github.

Recent versions of the Faker gem retrieve their strings from your locale file (e.g. config/locale/de.yml). This leads to awesome errors like this:

undefined method `shuffle' for "translation missing: de.faker.lorem.words":ActiveSupport::SafeBuffer

To fix this, copy the contents of a Faker locale file into your config/locale/de.yml.

This is stupid.

You need to
apt-get install libcurl3-dev

Since May 2011 we are cutting new gems using Bundler, which is less painful than cutting gems using Jeweler. You know a gem was cut using Bundler if you see the word Bundler in a gem project's Rakefile.

This is how to update a gem that was cut using Bundler:

• Say git pull or check out a repository from Github like git clone git@github.com:makandra/geordi.git
• Update the gem version in `lib/project...

This is an awful way to test whether a number is shown on the screen:

Then I should see "5"

It is awful because the step above is green for 5, 5123 and -51.

This step definition below makes sure this doesn't happen. You can use it like this:

Then I should see the number 5

The step also works if you you'd like to test that the number is followed by a unit:

Then I should see the amount 5 €

The separator between the number and its unit is allowed to be either a space or a [nbsp](https://makandracards.com/makandra/838-generate...

Asset pipeline, HTTP streaming, jQuery as default framework, auto-reversable migrations, identity map for ActiveRecord.

Ruby 1.8.x support will be dropped with or after Rails 4.

Today I needed to execute a ruby gem executable with sudo. But, surprisingly, bash would tell me command not found for the gem that ran lovely without sudo.

Gem bins are installed to /var/lib/gems/1.8/bin, which is not in sudo’s PATH. Unfortunately, you can’t change the path, since sudo for Ubuntu is compiled with the --with-secure-path option.

#Solution A: symlink the gems (if you need only some few gems)

• for each gem you need for sudo, run `ln -s /var/lib/gems/1.8/bin/gem_for_sudo /usr/local/bin/gem_for_sudo

#Soluti...

Before installing chef, make sure curl is installed and sudo finds your gems

• setup chef-client: follow this guide
• setup chef-server: follow this guide

#Important

• execute all commands from within your chef-repo directory, else you'll be missing out on configuration files

We regularly need to connect to the server in order to e.g. access the production console. Guessing the Capistrano deploy user and then again guessing the right directory on the server is awkward, so we wrote a script that parses config/deploy and gives you the handy command shell-for.

Run it from any project directory like this, passing a Capistrano multistage deployment target:

shell-for staging

Now it also supports commands to be remotely executed before loading the bash. Use --no-bash to only execute the command and load no ba...

When you simply want to get to know Puppet, follow puppetlabs’ Learning Puppet Docs. They give you a handy introduction inside a virtual machine they provide. You can watch the talk by Garrett Honeycutt 'Expanded Introduction to Puppet'.

Do not miss their cheatsheat and their [learn-puppet virtual machine](http://info.puppetl...

Although regular expression syntax is 99% interchangeable between languages, keep this in mind:

• By default, the dot character (".") does not match a line feed (newline, line break, "\n") in any language.
• Some languages allow you to modify the behavior of a regular expression by appending a modifier to the pattern expression. E.g. /foo/i makes the pattern case-insensitive in many languages. Note however that some of these modifiers may not exist or mean entirely different things in different languages.
• Some languages have a m...

We recently decided to put static content for HouseTrip.com to Amazon Cloudfront for a faster user experience. This happens fully automatically on deploy and is transparent in development. Together with a heavy use of sprites this sped up page load time quite nicely.

These are a couple of the problems you need to solve in order to do this:

• There is no good way to invalidate Cloudfront cached assets, and Cloudfront will ignor...

You know that you can collect an array as groups using in_groups or in_groups_of.

Maybe you want to fetch those values in "columns" where the first value lives in the first column, the second one in the second, etc. until it wraps, so that for example the fourth value is in the first of three columns.

Put the attached file into config/initializers/ to be able to say in_columns on any Array:

>> [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7].in_columns(3)
=> [[1, 4, 7], [2, 5], [...

Run rspec-and-cucumber from any project directory to run both RSpec and Cucumber. If available, rspec_spinner or cucumber_spinner are used.

Note that features are not run when specs fail.\
If you prefer to run them in parallel or run features regardless of the spec results, please adjust it for yourself accordingly.

This script is part of our geordi gem on github.