clemens's delocalize at master - GitHub

delocalize provides localized date/time and number parsing functionality for Rails.

Install RubyGems on Ubuntu/Debian

First of all: You could just use RVM which would make the pain go away. If for some reason you can't, proceed.


Do not use rubygems from the apt repository.

  1. Get the latest RubyGems TGZ
  2. Change to the download directory and extract it:\
    tar xvfz rubygems-1.3.7.tgz
  3. If you previously had RubyGems installed via apt: \
    sudo apt-get remove rubygems
  4. Install RubyGems:\
    cd rubygems-1.3.7 && sudo ruby setup.rb
  5. Link gem to gem1.8:\
    `sudo ...

Detect the language of a string

You can use the whatlanguage gem to detect the language of a Ruby string.
Note that it also has not been updated in quite a while and that there might be alternatives. However, it still works.

It has problems with short strings, but works quite well on longer texts.

Use it like this:

>> WhatLanguage.new(:all).language('Half the price of a hotel for twice the space')
=> :english

There is also a convenience method on Strings (you may need to require 'whatlanguage/string').

>> 'Wir ent...

rhulse's rails-css-views at master - GitHub

This gem is designed to provide CSS views to Rails, and a process to concatenate and minify these files to one file for production.

Install a local Gemfile on a remote server

Call with the server's hostname (and user if you have no SSH agent), e.g.

install-gems-remotely my.server.com
# or without agent:
install-gems-remotely me@my.server.com

When you call it from a rails directory, it uploads your Gemfile, Gemfile.lock as well as the gemspecs of all vendored gems in to a temporary folder on the server and does a bundle install there.

If you need to install gems from anothere Gemfile, just do it like this:
BUNDLE_GEMFILE=Gemfile.something; install-gems-remotely my.server.com


This scri...

Know your Haml comments

There are two distinct ways of commenting Haml markup: HTML and Ruby.

HTML comments

This will create an HTML comment that will be sent to the client (aka browser):

/= link_to 'Example', 'www.example.com'

This produces the following HTML:

<!-- = link_to 'Example', 'www.example.com' -->

Only use this variant if you need the comment to appear in the HTML.

Ruby comments

This will comment code so it will not be sent to the client:

-# = link_to 'foo'

99% of the time you'll be adding notes f...

Debug Ruby code

This is an awesome gadget in your toolbox, even if your test coverage is great.

  • gem install ruby-debug (Ruby 1.8) or gem install debugger (Ruby 1.9)
  • Start your server with script/server --debugger
  • Set a breakpoint by invoking debugger anywhere in your code
  • Open your application in the browser and run the code path that crosses the breakpoint
  • Once you reach the breakpoint, the page loading will seem to "hang".
  • Switch to the shell you started the server with. That shell will be running an irb session where you can step thr...

Override e-mail recipients in ActionMailer

Our gem Mail Magnet allows you to override e-mail recipients in ActionMailer so all mails go to a given address.

This is useful for staging environments where you want to test production-like mail delivery without sending e-mails to real users.

Automatically run bundle exec if required

There will probably be better solutions as we become more experienced with using Bundler, and more command line tools become Bundler-aware.

b will use bundle exec if there is a Gemfile in the working directory, and run the call without Bundler otherwise.

b spec spec

This script is part of our geordi gem on github.

Load order of the environment

Rails 3, 4, 5, 6

  1. config/application.rb
  2. config/environment.rb before the initialize! call (we don't usually edit this file)
  3. The current environment, e.g. environments/production.rb
  4. Gems
  5. Vendored plugins
  6. All initializers in config/initializers/*.rb
  7. config/environment.rb after the initialize! call (we don't usually edit this file)
  8. Your own code from app

Rails 2

  1. Code in config/preinitializer.rb (if it exists)
  2. environment.rb, code above the Rails::Initializer.run blo...

Scope to records with a given state in state_machine

The state_machine gem ships with a scope with_state. This scope has some problems in complex queries or scope chains.

Use this instead:

named_scope :having_state, lambda { |*state_or_states|
  state_or_states = Array.wrap(state_or_states).map(&:to_s)
  { :conditions => [ 'articles.state IN (?)', state_or_states ] }
}

If you want a scope with hash options (with the side effects you should know about):

named_scope :having_st...

Bundler for Rails 2.3.x

Update RubyGems and Passenger

Bundler requires Rubygems >= 1.3.6. Run gem update --system if you have an older version.
It also is not compatible with older versions of passenger, so bring that up to date as well (2.2.15 works).

If you installed RubyGems through apt (which you should never do!), you may see a message giving you a hint to use apt to update.
Some people advise to install the 'rubygems-update-1.3.7' gem on Ubuntu systems if you used apt to install RubyGems.
I did that - and lost all...

Recursively remove unnecessary executable-flags

Sometimes files attain executable-flags that they do not need, e.g. when your Windows VM copies them over a Samba share onto your machine.

From inside your Rails project directory call regularly:

geordi remove-executable-flags

Runs chmod -x on Ruby, HTML, CSS, image, Rake and similar files.


This script is part of our geordi gem on github.

Boolean attributes and pretty enumerations in Cucumber Factory 1.7

Boolean attributes can now be set by appending "which", "that" or "who" at the end:

Given there is a movie which is awesome
And there is a movie with the name "Sunshine" that is not a comedy
And there is a director who is popular

Instead of "and" you can now also use "but" and commas to join sentences:

Given there is a movie which is awesome, popular and successful but not science fiction
And there is a director with the income "500000" but with the account balance "-30000"

Update with `sudo gem install cucumber_facto...

How Rails and MySQL are handling time zones

When working with times and dates in Rails applications, you need to deal with the following problem:

  • In Rails, Time objects have a time zone. You can get the zone name by doing time_object.zone.
  • This zone is considered when doing time calculations, e.g. 10 AM CEST minus 8 AM UTC is zero.
  • A datetime in MySQL does not have a zone. It just stores the literal string "2010-05-01 12:00:00".
  • That means that Rails must make assumptions about timestamps loaded from and written to MySQL.

Rails has two completely different modes ...

Ruby Java Bridge

rjb is a bridge software. It connects Ruby and Java.

Regular Expressions - Cheat Sheet

You can write regular expressions some different ways, e.g. /regex/ and %r{regex}. For examples, look here.

Remember that it is always a good idea to match a regex visually first.

Characters

Literal Characters

[ ] \ ^ $ . | ? * + ( )

Character Classes

[ae]            matches a and e, e.g. gr[ae]y => grey or gray => but NOT graay or graey
[0-9]  ...

Run a POP3 server on a directory of mail files with popthis

popthis is awesome when used with inaction_mailer.

Setup inaction_mailer

Install the gem:
sudo gem install popthis

Start the server:
popthis tmp/sent_mails/ # e.g. the folder containing the .txt-mails generated by inaction_mailer

Now, configure your mail client as follows:
Server: localhost
Protocol: POP3
Port: 2220
Username: anything
Password: anything

Marry Capybara with SSL-enabled applications

Capybara does not play nice with sites that have some actions protected by SSL, some not. A popular way to implement this in Rails is using the ssl_requirement plugin by DHH, which redirects a requests from HTTP to HTTPS if the requested action requires SSL and vice versa.

Capybara follows the redirect, but seems to forget the changed protocol for the next request. The only hack-free workaround right now is to use URLs in lieu of paths everywhere (links, form actions).

For a hackful fi...

rspec_candy is now a gem

Our awesome collection of rspec helpers (formerly known as "spec_candy.rb") is now available as a gem. It works, it is tested and there will be updates.

Usage

Add rspec_candy to your Gemfile.

Add require 'rspec_candy/helpers' to your spec_helper.rb, after the rspec requires.

List of features

See on GitHub

Announcing YARD 0.6.0 (gnuu.org)

YARD 0.6 adds the ability to serve documentation for gems as well as the current project with yard server. Just like gem server in RubyGems, you can serve gem docs. The advantage to YARD’s server is that you don’t need to pre-generate the static docs (with a gem install) before running the server. If you installed your gem with --no-rdoc, YARD will just generate it on the fly!

Ruby Reports

Ruport’s acts_as_reportable module provides support for using ActiveRecord for data collection. You can use it to get a Ruport::Data::Table from an ActiveRecord model. This cheatsheet covers the basic functionality of acts_as_reportable and some common use cases.

Build a JSON API for a Rails application

Try our Apify gem which solves many problems you will be having.

jeremyevans's home_run at master - GitHub

home_run is an implementation of ruby’s Date/DateTime classes in C, with much better performance (20-200x) than the version in the standard library, while being almost completely compatible.