6.0.0 2021-06-02

Compatible changes

• geordi commit will continue even if one of the given projects is inaccessible. It will only fail if no stories could be found at all.

Breaking changes

• Removed VNC test browser support for integration tests – Headless Chrome has
  matured and is almost a drop-in replacement. Also, key binding issues have
  increased with VNC and recent Linux.
  • Please use a headless Chrome setup https://makandracards.com/makandra/492109-capybara-running-tests-with-headless-chrome.
  • You might also ...

While renaming a file sometimes feels like "dropping its history", that is not true: Just use git log --follow on renamed files to access their full history.

Given a file "bar" that was previously named "foo":

touch foo
git add foo
git commit -m "Add foo"
mv foo bar
git add bar
git commit -m "Rename foo to bar"

git log bar

commit adc8e6a05b65355359c4e4618d6af0ed8f8b7f14 (HEAD -> git-follow)
Author: Michael Leimstaedtner <makmic@makandra.de>
Date:   Wed May 12 08:49:37 2021 +0200

    Rename foo to bar

git lo...

When deleting a record in your Rails app, Carrierwave automatically takes care of removing all associated files.
However, the file's container directory will not be removed automatically. If you delete records regularly, this may be an annoyance.

Here is a solution which was adapted from the Carrierwave GitHub wiki and cleans up any empty parent directories it can find.

class ExampleUploader < CarrierWave...

Use rules to include or exclude jobs in pipelines.

Rules are evaluated in order until the first match. When a match is found, the job is either included or excluded from the pipeline, depending on the configuration. The job can also have certain attributes added to it.

rules replaces only/except and they can’t be used together in the same job. If you configure one job to use both keywords, the linter returns a key may not be used with rules error.

GitLab 12.3 introduced rules. You can use them in your .gitlab-ci.yml in your proj...

Installing gems on a server that has no access to the internet (especially rubygems.org) requires to bundle the gems into the repository itself. This requires to adjust the bundle config in the repository.

1. Execute the following commands to configure bundler:

bundle config set --local path vendor
bundle config set --local disable_shared_gems true

Note

For Bundler < 2 you have to omit the "set": bundle config --local name value.
See here: [https://bundler.io/v1.17/man/bundle-config.1.html](https://bundler.io/v1.17/man...

If a project ist configured to spawn CI runners for tests or deployment when pushing to the Repo, a habit of pushing WIP commits regularly may conflict with that.
Here are two solutions that allow you to keep pushing whenever you feel like it.

Special commit message

To skip a CI run, simply add [ci skip] or [skip ci] to your commit message. Example:

git commit -m "wip authentication [ci skip]"

Git push options (GitLab)

In addition to that, GitLab CI supports Git push options. Instead of changing your commit message, ...

5.4.0 2021-02-01

Compatible changes

• Add geordi branch command that checks out a feature branch based on a story from Pivotal Tracker
• Faster MySQL dumping with --single-transaction and --quick
• Allow pivotal tracker ids in the global config file
• Fix missing require for Fileutils in the dump load command (#145)
• Document PARALLEL_TEST_PROCESSORS

We had the issue, that a VCR spec failed, after updating CarrierWave from version 0.11.0 to 1.3.2.
In this version, CarrierWave uses the gem SsrfFilter, which retrieves the IP addresses for the given hostname and replaces the hostname in the requested url with one of them.

It works with IPv4 addresses, but not with IPv6 addresses, because WebMock cannot handle those correctly:

uri = "#{protocol}://...

tl;dr: Upgrade the gem to at least 4.0.1

When you use rspec_rails in a version < 4 with Rails 6.1 you may encounter an error like this:

Failure/Error:
  raise WrongScopeError,
    "`#{name}` is not available from within an example (e.g. an " \
    "`it` block) or from constructs that run in the scope of an " \
    "example (e.g. `before`, `let`, etc). It is only available " \
    "on an example group (e.g. a `describe` or `context` block)."
    `name` is not available from within an example (e.g. an `it` block) or from constructs that...

A rough guide how to implement a REST API.

The discussion here includes some interesting points as well:

• Timestamps: ISO8601 format ("2021-02-22T20:34:53.686Z")
• Google API guideline: https://google.aip.dev/
• Numbers: String vs. Number

  The JSON number type is not a double. It's just a number of arbitrary size and precision in integer/decimal/E format that can be parsed as whatever the parser finds fitting.

• Pagination: Limit + Offset vs. Object ID / Pointer vs. System-Version...

If your project depends on an old version of ImageMagick that you can no longer install in your system, you can choose the run an old ImageMagick in a Docker container.

Dockerized ImageMagick commands will only work with absolute path arguments. You need to boot a corresponding docker container once before using it.

Setting up Docker

If you haven't installed Docker yet, use our guide or the [official instructions](https://docs.docker.com/get-started/...

You can use git worktree to manage multiple working trees attached to the same repository. But why should I use git worktree?

You can use more than one working tree to ...

... run tests while working on another branch
... compare multiple versions
... work on a different branch without disturbing your current branch

Creating a new working tree is as simple as creating a new branch. You only need to execute git worktree add <path> <branch>. When you are done, you can remove the working tree with git worktree remove <Worktree>...

Rails 6 includes a WYSIWYG editor, Action Text. It works out of the box quite well, but chances are that you want to add some custom functionality. This card contains some tips how to achieve this.

Setup

Basically, follow the guide in the Rails documentation. The automated script may not work with the way webpacker is configured in your project, but it should be easy to fix.

If you don't want the default c...

I just finished migrating a project from the Asset Pipeline to Webpacker, this is what my diff to master looks like:

5.825 files changed, 44.805 insertions(+), 529.948 deletions(-)
warning: inexact rename detection was skipped due to too many files.
warning: you may want to set your diff.renameLimit variable to at least 5134 and retry the command.

There is no way me or my peer reviewer is able to parse 500k+ lines of code. Fortunately, git has ...

In long diffs, it can become impossible to spot small changes in larger blocks of moved code. This may be either a method that was moved from the top to the bottom of a file, or a long test file that was split in many.

Fortunately, Git offers a special highlighting mode that directs the reader's attention to relevant code parts:

git diff --color-moved=dimmed-zebra

It will dim lines that were moved around without changes, and highlight changed lines.
To easily use dimmed-zebra mode, configure an alias:

# ~/.gitconfig
[alias]
 ...

Using Ruby 1.8.7 you will not be able to use the maximum versions Rubygems 1.8.30 and Bundler 1.17.3 with https://rubygems.org/ anymore. This is a result of a server certificate on December 5th, 2020. The resulting errors will look like following:

• TypeError: can't modify frozen object
• Could not verify the SSL certificate for https://rubygems.org/*
• Bundler::Fetcher::CertificateFailureError: Could not verify the SSL certificate for https://index.rubygems.org/versions.
• `Error fetching data: hostname was not m...

Git diffs show the surrounding contexts for diff hunks. It does so by applying regular expressions to find the beginning of a context. When it comes to Ruby, however, it will not find method heads and travel up to the class definition:

@@ -24,7 +24,7 @@ class TicketPdf # <=== Actually expected here: the method definition
     ApplicationController.render(
       "tickets/index.html.haml",
       layout: "tickets",
-      assigns: { tickets: tickets }
+      assigns: { tickets: tickets, event_name: event_name }
     )
   end
 end
```...

Here is a short summary of Cucumber hooks in Ruby taken from https://github.com/cucumber/cucumber-ruby. Note that the BeforeStep is currently not existing in the Ruby implementation of Cucumber.

Before hooks run before the first step of each scenario.

Before do |scenario|
  ...
end

After hooks run after the last step of each scenario, even when the step result is failed, undefined, pending or skipped.

...

We currently test most of our gems on Travis CI, but want to migrate those tests to Github Actions. This is a step-by-step guide on how to do this.

Note that this guide requires the gem to use gemika.

1. Go to a new "ci" branch:

   git checkout -b ci
   

2. Update gemika to version >= 0.5.0 in all your Gemfiles.
3. Have gemika generate a Github Actions workflow definition by running

   mkdir -p .github/workflows; bundle exec rake gemika:generate_github_actions_workflow > .github/workf...
   

On some of our older projects, we use the mysql2 gem. Unfortunately, versions 0.2.x (required for Rails 2.3) and versions 0.3.x (required for Rails 3.2) can no longer be installed on Ubuntu 20.04. Trying this either leads to errors when compiling the native extension, or a segfaults when using it.

For Rails 4.2, mysql2 version 0.4.10 seems to work okay. If you still have issues, upgrade to 0.5.x, which should be compatible.

To install it, you have to switch the mysql2 gem to our fork. In your Gemfile, ...

When loading a database dump created with pg_dump into your database, you might run into an error like

pg_restore: error: unsupported version (1.15) in file header

This is because your local pg_restore version is too old to match the format created by pg_dump. The version of the PostgreSQL server doesn't matter here.

For example, the official Ubuntu 20.04 sources include only PostgreSQL 12, so your pg_restore version will also be v12. Ubuntu 22.04 includes version 14 in its sources.
Both seem to be incompatible with dumps ...

It sometimes happen that a database dump, that would want to insert into your development database, does not match the current schema of the database. This often happens when you have an old dump, but your current setup is up to date with the the master.

Hint: In most cases it is sufficient to delete and recreate the local database in order to import the dump. If any problems occur, proceed as follows:

1. Figure out the original migration status of the dumpfile

• Convert your dump to plaintext: `pg_restore -f some.dump > some.dump....

To find a version containing the regular expression foo in the history of any branch:

git grep foo $(git rev-list --all)

You may also limit the search to a file extension, e.g. Ruby files (.rb) like this:

git grep foo $(git rev-list --all) -- *.rb