SASS: Reusing styles from other files

SASS has an @extend keyword to inherit styles.

.alert
  color: red
  
  &.-framed
    border: 1px solid red
    padding: 5px
    
  &.-homepage
    @extend .-framed
    border-width: 5px

When compiling, SASS will simply join the selectors. Note how .-homepage is written where .-framed was defined:

...
.alert.-framed, .alert.-homepage {
  border: 1px solid red;
  padding: 5px;
}
.alert.-homepage {
  border-width: 5px;
}

Warning

Unfortunately, this does...

Middleman configuration for Rails Developers

Middleman is a static page generator that brings many of the goodies that Rails developers are used to.

Out of the box, Middleman brings Haml, Sass, helpers etc. However, it can be configured to do even better. This card is a list of improvement hints for a Rails developer.

Gemfile

Remove tzinfo-data and wdm unless you're on Windows. Add these gems:

gem 'middleman-livereload'
gem 'middleman-sprockets' # Asset pipeline!

gem 'bootstrap-sass' # If you want to use Bootstrap

gem 'byebug'

gem 'capistrano'
gem 'capistrano-mid...

Lightning Talk: Coverage based Test Case Prioritization in Ruby on Rails

For my computer science bachelor's thesis I programmed and evaluated a CLI Test Case Prioritization (TCP) tool for makandra. It has been written as a Ruby Gem and was tested and evaluated against one Ruby on Rails project. This card will summarize and present the research results, the evaluation and the programmed CLI tool.

The code has been published for educational purposes on GitHub. The german bachelor's thesis has also been included for download at the end.


...

JavaScript without jQuery

This is a presentation from 2019-01-21.

Summary

  • We want to move away from jQuery in future projects
  • Motivations are performance, bundle size and general trends for the web platform.
  • The native DOM API is much nicer than it used to be, and we can polyfill the missing pieces
  • Unpoly 0.60.0 works with or without jQuery

Is jQuery slow?

From: Sven
To: unpoly@googlegroups.com
Subject: performance on smartphones and tablets

Hello

I just used your framework in one project and must say,
I am really pleased with it -- but o...

How to create Rails Generators (Rails 3 and above)

General

Programatically invoke Rails generators

Require the generator, instantiate it and invoke it (because generators are Thor::Groups, you need to invoke them with invoke_all). Example:

 require 'generators/wheelie/haml/haml_generator'
 Generators::HamlGenerator.new('argument').invoke_all

Other ways: Rails invokes its generators with Rails::Generators.invoke ARGV.shift, ARGV. From inside a Rails generator, you may call the [inherited Thor method invoke(args=[], options={}, config={})](https://github...

What we know about PDFKit

What PDFKit is

  • PDFKit converts a web page to a PDF document. It uses a Webkit engine under the hood.
  • For you as a web developer this means you can keep using the technology you are familar with and don't need to learn LaTeX. All you need is a pretty print-stylesheet.

How to use it from your Rails application

  • You can have PDFKit render a website by simply calling PDFKit.new('http://google.com').to_file('google.pdf'). You can then send the...

Enabling YJIT

YJIT is Ruby's default just-in-time compiler. It is considered production-ready since Ruby 3.2 (source).

To activate YJIT you need two steps:

  • Your ruby binary needs to be compiled with YJIT support.
  • You need to enable YJIT.

Getting a Ruby with YJIT support

We usually install Ruby with tools like rbenv or asdf. This compiles the ruby binary from the source code. Support for YJIT will be automatically added during this compilation...

Running Rubocop as a pre-push hook

Git has the concept of hooks: bash scripts that are invoked at certain points in the Git lifecycle. One handy use is a pre-push hook that runs Rubocop. It will prevent pushing code that Rubocop finds fault with.

Configuring the hook

Git hooks are normally stored locally with a repository. They are not committed.

  1. Store this snippet in .git/hooks/pre-push:
if [ -f ./.rubocop.yml ]; then                                                  
  echo 'Running Rubocop ...'                                                    
  bundle exe...

How to monitor Sidekiq: A working example

In order to have monitoring for Sidekiq (like queue sizes, last run of Sidekiq) your application should have a monitoring route which returns a json looking like this:

{
  "sidekiq": {
    "totals": {
      "failed": 343938,
      "processed": 117649167
    },
    "recent_history": {
      "failed": {
        "2016-11-06": 1,
        "2016-11-07": 46,
        "2016-11-08": 0,
        "2016-11-09": 0,
        "2016-11-10": 0
      },
      "processed": {
        "2016-11-06": 230653,
        "2016-11-07": 230701,
        "2016-11-08"...

Some tips for upgrading Bootstrap from 3 to 4

Recently I made an upgrade from Bootstrap 3 to Bootstrap 4 in a bigger project. Here are some tips how to plan and perform such an upgrade. The effort will scale with the size of the project and its structure. If your stylesheets already follow strict rules, it may take less time to adapt them to the new version.

Preparation

There are several gems and libraries that works well with bootstrap or provide at least stylesheets/plugins to easily integrate the bootstrap theme. But very often they only work with specific version or are no long...

Local development with SSL and Puma

Sometimes the need arises for SSL in local development. We have guides for different webservers, this one is for puma.

  1. make sure mkcert is installed

  2. create an SSL certificate for localhost with mkcert:

$ mkcert-v1.4.4-linux-amd64 localhost
Created a new local CA 💥
...
  1. use the certificate in the Puma config config/puma.rb:
localhost_key = "#{File.join('localhos...

Capistrano 3: Running a command on all servers

This Capistrano task runs a command on all servers.

bundle exec cap production app:run cmd='zgrep -P "..." RAILS_ROOT/log/production.log'

Code

# lib/capistrano/tasks/app.rake

namespace :app do

  # Use e.g. to grep logs on all servers:
  #   b cap production app:run_cmd cmd='zgrep -P "..." RAILS_ROOT/log/production.log' 
  #
  # * Use RAILS_ROOT as a placeholder for the remote Rails root directory.
  # * Append ` || test $? =1;` to grep calls in order to avoid exit code 1 (= "nothing found")
  # * To be able to process ...

Configuring Webpacker deployments with Capistrano

When deploying a Rails application that is using Webpacker and Capistrano, there are a few configuration tweaks that optimize the experience.

Using capistrano-rails

capistrano-rails is a Gem that adds Rails specifics to Capistrano, i.e. support for Bundler, assets, and migrations. While it is designed for Asset Pipeline (Sprockets) assets, it can easily be configured for Webpacker. This brings these features to the Webpacker world:

  • Automatic removal of expired assets
  • Manifest backups

RubyMine: How to add a german spell checker

Grazie Lite

Rubymine 2024.3 bundles Grazie Lite by default. You need to enabled "German" under Settings/Preferences | Editor | Natural Languages.

Hunspell (legacy)

  1. Install the Hunspell plugin and restart Ruby Mine
  2. Run sudo apt install hunspell-de-de
  3. Select /usr/share/hunspell/de_DE.dic in File > Settings > Editor > Spelling > Custom Directory +

![Screenshot_from_2018-10-17_16-47-03.png](https://makandracards.com/makandra/57341-rubymine...

ActiveStorage: How to add a new preprocessed named version

Given there is a user with an attachable avatar:

class User < ApplicationRecord
  has_one_attached :avatar
end

If you want to add a preprocessed version follow these steps:

  1. Add the named version and deploy
class User < ApplicationRecord
  has_one_attached :avatar do |attachable|
    attachable.variant :preview, resize_to_fit: [177, 177 * 9 / 16], preprocessed: true
  end
end
  1. Preprocess this version for all existing records `bundle exec rails runner 'User.find_each { |user| user.avatar.variant(:preview).proc...

How to fix: Gems are unavailable although they are installed

  • If Rails or Rake are complaining about a missing gem that is listed in your Gemfile.lock and the listed version is properly installed, something is seriously wrong and needs to be fixed.
  • If you accidently executed bundle install some_gem although you wanted bundle update some_gem

What is wrong

Let's say your Gemfile asks for some-gem which you can see when running gem list but bundle show some-gem just gives you an error:

Could not find gem 'some-gem', in any of the sources

Another indicator: Doing a `...

Chromedriver: Connect local chromedriver with docker

Debugging your integration tests, that run a headless Chrome inside a docker image, is tricky.

In many cases you can connect your Chrome to a remote docker container like docker-selenium, which should be the preferred way when you try to inspect a page within your integration test.

Otherwise you might be able to start your docker container with --net=host and access your local chromedriver in the host address space host.docker.internal.

If both options above don't work for you here is a...

Webpacker: Loading code on demand

Sometimes you want to load code on demand. For instance, when a a large library is only used on a single screen, this library should only be loaded for that screen. It should not blow up the bundle size for all screens.

You can load code on demand by using import() as a function (with parentheses) instead of using it as a keyword import (without parentheses). The import() function returns a promise with the exported variables:

let exports = await import('large-library')

console.log("A named export is ", exports.exportedName)
c...

Yarn: Use yarn-deduplicate to cleanup your yarn.lock

Note

Use yarn dedupe in Yarn v2+: https://yarnpkg.com/cli/dedupe

This package only works with Yarn v1. Yarn v2 supports package deduplication natively!

A duplicate package is when two dependencies are resolved to a different version, even when a single version matches the range specified in the dependencies. See the Deduplication strategies section for a few examples.

Yarn is stupid, so it can happen that there are several version of the same package in your bundle, although one would fulf...

Heads up: Deployment with newly generated SSH key (using ED25519) might fail

If you use a newer SSH key generated with the ED25519 algorithm instead of RSA (see Create a new SSH key pair), the deployment with Capistrano may fail with the following message:

The deploy has failed with an error: unsupported key type `ssh-ed25519'
net-ssh requires the following gems for ed25519 support:
 * ed25519 (>= 1.2, < 2.0)
 * bcrypt_pbkdf (>= 1.0, < 2.0)
See https://github.com/net-ssh/net-ssh/issues/565 for more information
Gem::LoadError : "ed25519 i...

Solving "TypeError (nil can't be coerced into Integer)" in the Rails console / IRB

On the Rails console, assigning an object to a variable can lead to this strange error (without stacktrace):

irb > recipient = Recipient.find(123)
Traceback (most recent call last):
TypeError (nil can't be coerced into Integer)
irb > recipient
#<Recipient ...

The error is only in the output – the assignment is working. It only occurs when using the --nomultiline option, and thus [only with IRB 1.2.0+ and before Ruby 3](https://github.com/makandra/geordi/blob...

How to fix "undefined method `name' for Array" error when running bundled commands on Ruby 1.8.7 + Rails 2.3

On recent/fresh installations of Ruby 1.8.7 you may encounter this error why calling any bundled binary (or just bundle exec):

/home/arne/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.8.7-p374@global/gems/rubygems-bundler-1.4.2/lib/rubygems-bundler/noexec.rb:75:in `setup': undefined method `name' for #<Array:0x7fe04783ef30> (NoMethodError)
  from /home/arne/.rvm/rubies/ruby-1.8.7-p374/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/rubygems/custom_require.rb:29:in `map'
  ...

Apparently, this is due to bundler (or maybe the rubygems-bundler that RVM supplies by default) no lon...

How to: Run geordi in a single proccess with parallel test setup

Geordi uses parallel_tests if available for running the test suite. To debug an application it is very unhandy to have multiple processes as your terminal I/O will not work as expected once a breakpoint is hit.

Even parallel_tests support an option to enable a single process run, it is not possible to pass this option through geordi. But you can set the number of processes via ENV variable manually:

PARALLEL_TEST_PROCESSORS=1 bundle exec geordi cucu...

Monitor a Rake task with God

In order to monitor a Rake task using God your Rake file must write a file with its process ID (PID) to a path determined by God. This way God can check whether the Rake process is still alive.

Here is how to do this: In your God config, call the Rake task with an environment variable PIDFILE. This variable should equal the PID file path desired by God:

God.watch do |w|
  w.dir = "#{rails_root}"
  w.name = "my_task"
  w.interval = 10.seconds
  w.pid_file = "#{rails_root}/tmp/pids/#{w.name}...