A flaky test is a test that is often green, but sometimes red. It may only fail on some PCs, or only when the entire test suite is run.

There are many causes for flaky tests. This card focuses on a specific class of feature with heavy side effects, mostly on on the UI. Features like the following can amplify your flakiness issues by unexpectedly changing elements, causing excessive requests or other timing issues:

• Lazy loading images
• Autocomplete in search f...

If you want Sidekiq to be able to talk to Redis on staging and production servers, you need to add the following to your configuration:

# config/initializers/sidekiq.rb
require 'sidekiq'

Sidekiq.configure_client do |config|
  config.redis = { url: REDIS_URL }
end

Sidekiq.configure_server do |config|
  config.redis = { url: REDIS_URL }
end

The following step may be skipped for new Sidekiq 6+, since it isn't recommended anymore to use a global redis client.

# config/initializers/redis.rb
require 'redis'
require_relativ...

Within development and test environments, Rails is usually configured to show a detailed debug page instead of 404s. However, there might be some cases where you expect a 404 and want to test for it.

An example would be request-specs that check authorization rules. (If you use a gem like consul for managing authorization rules, you should always check these rules via power-specs. However, request-specs can be used as a light-weight version of integration tests here.)

In this case, Rails will replace the 404 page that you want to test ...

This RailsCast demonstrated a very convenient method to activate VCR for a spec by simply tagging it with :vcr.

For RSpec3 the code looks almost the same with a few minor changes. If you have the vcr and webmock gems installed, simply include:

# spec/support/vcr.rb
VCR.configure do |c|
  c.cassette_library_dir = Rails.root.join("spec", "vcr")
  c.hook_into :webmock
end

RSpec.configure do |c|
  c.around(:each, :vcr) do |example|
    name = example.metadata[:full_descripti...

RSpec is smart when using the include-matcher in combination with .not_to. One could assume that

.not_to include(3, 4, 5)

evaluates to:

NOT( .to include(3, 4, 5) )

However, it behaves like:

.to (NOT include(3) && NOT include(4) && NOT include(5) )

Warning

Using .not_to in combination with the include-matcher doesn't logically negate the final truth value. It instead negates the individual include-expectations for each argument.

Proof

describe 'RSpec' do
  it "doesn't use logical nega...

Debugging in CSS means figuring out what might be the problem when you have unexpected layout results. We’ll look at a few categories bugs often fit into, see how we can evaluate the situation, and explore techniques that help prevent these bugs.

The gem better_errors offers a detailed error page with an interactive REPL for better debugging.
I had the issue that on a few projects with Ruby 2.5.8, the REPL was not shown.

Solution

To make the REPL work properly with this Ruby version I had to update the gem binding_of_caller to at least version 0.8.0.

From the [better_errors](https://github.com/BetterE...

Inspired by recent "git shortcut" cards I figured it would be nice to have one of these for rebasing a few commits onto another branch. The usual notation is prone to of-by-one errors as you have to either specify the commit before the ones you want to move or count the number of commits.

You may add this rebase-onto function to your ~/.bashrc:

function rebase-onto {
  commit=$(git log --oneline | fzf --prompt 'Select the first commit y...

Sometimes a link or input field has no visible label. E.g. a text field with a magnifying glass icon 🔎 and a "Search" button does not really need a visible label "Query".

For accessibility reasons it is good practice to give such a field an [aria-label] attribute:

<input type="search" aria-label="Search contacts">

This way, when a visually impaired user focuses the field, the screen reader will speak the label text ("Search contacts").

Info

Without an `[aria-...

Most browsers have built-in drag and drop support for different page elements like text and images. While this may be useful in most situations, it may become annoying in others. If you e.g. want to allow the user to scroll/move horizontally within a container by grabbing an item and moving the mouse, you will notice that nothing will move and you'll instead start dragging that element.

To disable this, add the following CSS to your content:

-webkit-user-drag: none
user-drag: none

-webkit-user-drag is only fully supported in ...

webpack is a very powerful asset bundler written in node.js to bundle (ES6) JavaScript modules, stylesheets, images, and other assets for consumption in browsers.

Webpacker is a wrapper around webpack that handles integration with Rails.

This is a short introduction.

Installation

If you haven't already, you need to install node.js and Yarn.

Then, put

gem 'webpacker', '~> 4.x' # check if 4.x is still cu...

If you have fzf installed, you may add an alias such as this to your ~/.bashrc:

alias recent-branch="git for-each-ref --sort=-committerdate --format='%(refname:short)' refs/heads/ |  fzf | sed 's/\* //g' | xargs -I '{}' git checkout {}"
alias rb=recent-branch

Now whenever you want to switch back and forth between your most recent branches, type recent-branch, select one and press enter.

We are using Spring in our tests for sequential test execution but not for parallel test execution. And Rails requires you to set the config.cache_classes = false if you are using Spring in tests.

With our setup, this would raise the following error in cucumber-rails for parallel test executions due to some legacy database cleaner issue.

WARNING: You have set Rails' config.cache_classes to false
    (Spring needs cache_classes set to false). This is known to cause probl...

Bookmarks for directories will be most helpful if you are forced to work in deeply nested projects. Then it's really helpful!

This makes use of the CDPATH variable. Similar to the PATH variable, which holds the list of directories which are searched for executables, CDPATH contains the list of directories that are available for cd. Besides the current directory (.), you can add others to that.

The trick is to add a directory for bookmarks to CDPATH.

First, create the directory with: mkdir ~/.bookmarks.

Then add the followin...

With cd .. you can navigate one directory up from the one you are at now. If you use that a lot, consider some handy aliases.

Add the following lines to your ~/.bashrc:

alias ..="cd .."
alias ...="cd ../.."
alias ....="cd ../../.."
alias .....="cd ../../../.."
alias ......="cd ../../../../.."

you can add even more aliases, but I usually loose track after too many levels and just jump to the directly directly, e.g. using its absolute path or its bookmark (see [this card](https://makandracards.com/makandra/504947-working-on-the-li...

TLDR: Ruby class variables (@@foo) are dangerous in many ways. You should avoid them at all cost. See bottom of this card for alternatives.

Class variables are shared between a class hierarchy

When you declare a class variable, it is shared between this and all descending (inheriting) classes. This is rarely what you want.

Class variables are bound at compile-time

Like unqualified constants, class variables are bound to your current scope *whe...

age is a simple, modern and secure file encryption tool, format, and Go library.
It features small explicit keys, no config options, and UNIX-style composability.

Generally we are happy with GPG for encrypting emails. In case you are not happy with the CLI of GnuPG, this might be a tool you can use under the hood for encryption.

Rails has the handy controller method send_file which lets us download files easily. We can decide whether the file should be downloaded (disposition: 'attachment') or shown in the browser (disposition: 'inline'). The default is disposition: 'attachment'.

Downloading files will not work when you are calling the controller action from an AJAX request. The browser will try to render the file and insert it in the DOM, which is never what you want.

Unpoly 2

Unpoly (sin...

To avoid multiple versions of a package, you can manually maintain a resolutions section in your package.json. We recommend you to do this for packages like jQuery. Otherwise the jQuery library attached to window might not include the functions of your packages that depend on jQuery.

Note: This is only an issue in case you want to use a package functionality from window e.g. $(...).datepicker() from your dev console or any other javascript within the application.

Background

By default yarn will create a folder node_modules ...

Cucumber factory supports polymorphic associations out of the box. Just keep in mind that you need to use named associations for this purpose.

class Person < ApplicationModel
  has_many :buildings, inverse_of: :owner
end

class Company < ApplicationModel
  has_many :buildings, inverse_of: :owner
end

class Building < ApplicationModel
  belongs_to :owner, optional: true, polymorphic: true
end

Works

Given there is a person with the name "Nice person"
  And there is a bui...

The attached compiler() function below applies JavaScript behavior to matching HTML elements as they enter the DOM.

This works like an Unpoly compiler for apps that don't use Unpoly, Custom Elements or any other mechanism that pairs JavaScript with HTML elements.

The compiler() function is also a lightweight replacement for our legacy [$.unobtrusive()](https://makandracards.com/makandra/4-unobtrusiv...