Webpacker: Side effects of using window.* within the ProvidePlugin

Some older Node modules rely on window.jQuery to be present. One suggested solution is to use this config in the app/config/webpack/environment.js:

const { environment } = require('@rails/webpacker')
const webpack = require('webpack')

environment.plugins.prepend(
  'Provide',
  new webpack.ProvidePlugin({
    $: 'jquery',
    jQuery: 'jquery',
    'window.jQuery': 'jquery'
  })
)

module.exports = environment

This will work. But a side effect is that the fo...

PostgreSQL vs MySQL: How to UPDATE using a JOIN

When you want to UPDATE a table with information from an associated table, you can JOIN the associated table into the statement.

Example

Let's say you have a database schema where an Employee belongs_to :department:

+-----------------+
| Employee        |                   +------------+
|-----------------| n               1 | Department |
| email           |-------------------|------------+
| department_id   |                   | name       |
+-----------------+                   +------------+

Because of perfo...

How to test Autoprefixer and CSSnext in PostCSS

PostCSS is a tool for transforming styles with JS plugins. In Webpacker you can configure the plugins and their settings via the postcss.config.js file. Make sure that postcss-loader is part of your package.json.

module.exports = {
  plugins: [
    require('postcss-import'),
    require('postcss-flexbugs-fixes'),
    require('postcss-preset-env')({
      autoprefixer: {
        flexbox: 'no-2009'
      },
      stage: 3
    })
  ]
}

Note: Stage 3 means you can use all CSS features that ar...

Speed up your websites: Put JavaScripts at bottom

For websites that don't do JavaScript rendering on the client, it's best practice to put script tags at the bottom of the HTML. This way, the page can start to render before scripts have been loaded and run.

The caveat is that you also have to move all other script tags from your views to the bottom of the page. This can be done with helpers.

How to implement

  1. Add the attached javascript_helper to your app.
  2. Move your `javascript_i...

HTML emails with inline stylesheets and webpacker

Many mail clients do not support external style sheets. Some even require all styling inline, which means you'll have to do your styling inline. For Rails applications, you can use Roadie or premailer, which lets you keep your well-structured CSS files and do the inlining for you.

See Designing HTML email

Since Roadie is now in passive maintenance mode, we go with premailer:

Include premailer in your Gemfile:

gem 'premailer-ra...

Migration from the Asset Pipeline to Webpacker

This is a short overview of things that are required to upgrade a project from the Asset Pipeline to Webpacker. Expect this upgrade to take a few days even the diff is quite small afterwards.

Preparations

1. Find all libraries that are bundled with the asset pipeline. You can check the application.js and the application.css for require and import statements. The source of a library is most often a gem or a vendor directory.
2. Find an working example for each library in the application and write it down.
3. Find out the ver...

MySQL: How to create columns like "bigint" or "longtext" in Rails migrations, and what :limit means for column migrations

Rails understands a :limit options when you create columns in a migration. Its meaning depends on the column type, and sometimes the supplied value.

The documentation states that :limit sets the column length to the number of characters for string and text columns, and to the number of bytes for binary and integer columns.

Using it

This is nice since you may want a bigint column to store really long numbers in it. You can just create it by ...

Github Cheat Sheet

All the hidden and not hidden features of Git and GitHub.

During deployment: "You are trying to install in deployment mode after changing your Gemfile"

While deploying an Ruby update to an old application these days, we encountered the following misleading error:

*** [err :: some-host.makandra.de] You are trying to install in deployment mode after changing
*** [err :: some-host.makandra.de] your Gemfile. Run `bundle install` elsewhere and add the
*** [err :: some-host.makandra.de] updated Gemfile.lock to version control.
*** [err :: some-host.makandra.de] 
*** [err :: some-host.makandra.de] You have deleted from the Gemfile:
*** [err :: some-host.makandra.de] *

We found out a newe...

How to doubleclick in Selenium

Put the attached file into features/support/.

Example usage:

When /^I open the task named "(.+?)"$/ do |task_name|
  task = page.all('.task').detect do |t|
    t.find('.label').text.downcase == task_name.downcase
  end
  
  task.double_click
end

Note: only Selenium understands doubleclicks.\
Credits: the attached Capybara issue discussion.

Why you can't use timezone codes like "PST" or "BST" for Time objects

Rails' ActiveSupport::TimeWithZone objects have both a timezone code and offset, e.g. Thu, 28 Mar 2019 16:00:00 CET +01:00. Ruby's stdlib TZInfo also has time zones, but with different identifiers.
Unfortunately, not all timezone codes can be used to parse strings or to move time objects into another time zone.

Some timezone codes like CET are supported by ActiveSupport extensions like String#in_time_zone, while many codes will actually not work:

>> '2019-03-01 12:00'.in_time_zone('PST')
ArgumentError (Invalid Timezone: PST)
...

Git: Revert one or more commits

Reverting a commit means creating a new commit that undoes the old changes.

Imagine the following commit history:

* commit_sha3 [Story-ID 1] Fixup for my feature 
* commit_sha2 [Story-ID 5] Other feature
* commit_sha1 [Story-ID 1] My feature 

You can revert a single commit using the following syntax:

git revert commit_sha2

To revert changes that are split across multiple commits, use the --no-commit flag.

git revert --no-commit commit_sha3
git revert --no-commit commit_sha1
git commit -m "Revert Story 1"

CSS: Flex and "min-width"

min-width is known as a CSS property that can be set to define a least width for an element. Surprisingly, it can also be used to set something that feels like max-width.

min-width in a flex context

While the default min-width value is 0 (zero), for flex items it is more like "auto". This can make block elements take up much more space than desired, even stretching their container beyond the screen edge on small screens.

![Image](/makandra/66994/attach...

Using local fonts with Webpack / Webpacker

When we want to use our own (or bought) fonts in an application with Webpack(er), we have two options. We can

  • put the fonts directly into your Webpack's assets folder or
  • write an npm package with an own sass file that can be imported from the Webpack manifest.

Load fonts from your assets folder

The first option turns out to be straightforward: Import the stylesheets in the index.js of the pack you're using:

// webpack_source_path/application/index.js

import './stylesheets/reset'
import...

rails_state_machine 1.1.2 released

Fixed bugs where calling valid? would change the record's state.

How to fix parallel_tests with Redis on powerful machines

When you have a powerful machine with many CPU cores, you might run into an error like

ERR DB index is out of range (Redis::CommandError)

This is because Redis defaults to at most 16 databases (0 to 15) and running tests in parallel might exceed that (your tests might run on databases 1..n or 2..(n+1)).

You can increase that limit:

  1. Get number of CPUs of your machine.

    nproc --all
    
  2. Open up Redis configuration file.

    sudo vim /etc/redis/redis.conf
    
  3. Find databases row and increase it, e.g. set to 32:

...

How to fix: Session hash does not get updated when using "merge!"

tl;dr: Do not use merge! for session hashes. Use update instead.

Outline

Let's assume you're modifying the Rails session. For simplicity, let's also assume your session is empty when you start (same effect when there is data):

# In our example, we're in a Rack middleware
request = Rack::Request.new(env)
request.session.merge! :hello => 'Universe'
request.session
=> {}

Wat?

Even worse: When you inspect your request.session like above (e.g. in a debugger shell, o...

Bootstrap 4 skin for the Rome datepicker

Here is how to make Rome datepicker look like the rest of your Bootstrap 4 application.

Rome comes with very little basic styling. While we could redefine its classes, we can configure the classes Rome applies to its elements to make it look like this:

Example Image

Since Bootstrap 4 comes with several helpful utility classes, and requires fewer markup/containers, we can achieve Bootstrap 4 experience by applying a few classes via the styles setting.

You still need to include `ro...

Upgrade guide for moving a Rails app from Webpack 3 to Webpack 4

Webpacker is Rails' way of integrating Webpack, and version 4 has been released just a few days ago, allowing us to use Webpack 4.

I successfully upgraded an existing real-world Webpack 3 application. Below are notes on everything that I encountered.
Note that we prefer not using the Rails asset pipeline at all and serving all assets through Webpack for the sake of consistency.

Preparations

  • Remove version locks in Gemfile for webpacker
  • Remove version locks in package.json for webpack and webpack-dev-server
  • Install by ca...

Rails: How to get URL params without routing parameters (or vice versa)

Rails' params hash contains any request parameters (URL parameters or request payload) as well as routing parameters like :controller, :action, or :id.

To access only URL parameters, use request.query_parameters. Routing params are available through request.path_parameters.

# On /users?query=Bob&page=2

>> request.params
=> {"page"=>"2", "query"=>"Bob", "controller"=>"users", "action"=>"index"}

>> request.query_parameters
=> {"page"=>"2", "query"=>"Bob"}

>> request.path_parameters
=> {:controller=>"users", :action=>"i...

Micro clearfix mixin for Sass

Clearfix is a hack to clear floating elements without additional HTML markup.

If you only need to support IE8 and above, a great clearfix with few side effects is:

=clearfix
  &:after
    content: ""
    display: block
    clear: both

This is a Sass mixin.

Issues clearing with display: table

You will find many clearfix solutions that clear with display: table instead:

=clearfix
  &:after
    content: ""
    display: table
    clear: both

The problem with th...

Copy to clipboard without flash (clipboard.js)

We used zeroclipboard.js in some of our projects but now we switched to clipboard.js because it does not rely on flash. Flash support of the major browsers has ended.

Some more advantages of clipboard.js:

  • it consists only of a single javascript file, so it does not trigger additional requests with rails
  • it automagically provides user feedback by selecting the text it has copied
  • it provides callbacks for success and error which make it easier to add custom behaviour after copying to the clipboar...

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 install bundler for Ruby < 2.3

Bundler 2 requires at least Ruby 2.3.0 and RubyGems 2.5.0. You might get the following error when you try to install bundler for Ruby < 2.3:

ERROR:  Error installing bundler:
	bundler requires Ruby version >= 2.3.0.

To fix this error upgrade your project's ruby version or install the last supported version of Bundler for Ruby < 2.3:

gem install bundler -v '~>1'

You will also see an error if your [RubyGems versi...