A recent patch level Ruby update caused troubles to some of us as applications started to complain about incompatible gem versions. I'll try to explain how the faulty state most likely is achieved and how to fix it.

Theory

When you deploy a new Ruby version with capistrano-opscomplete, it will take care of a few things:

• The new Ruby version is installed
• The Bundler version stated in the Gemfil...

Intro

Embedding videos on a website is very easy, add a <video> tag to your source code and it just works. Most of the time.

The thing is: Both the operating system and Browser of your client must support the container and codecs of your video. To ensure playback on every device, you have to transcode your videos to one or more versions of which they are supported by every device out there.

In this card, I'll explore the available audio and video standards we have right now. The goal is to built a pipeline that...

This is a personal post-mortem analysis of a project that was mainly build to provide a REST API to mobile clients.

For the API backend we used the following components:

• Active Model Serializer (AMS) to serializer our Active Record models to JSON.
• JSON Schema to test the responses of our server.
• SwaggerUI to document the API.

It worked

The concept worked really good. Here are two points that were extraordinary compared to normal Rails project with many UI components:

• Having a Rails application, that has no UI components (only...

PostgreSQL and ActiveRecord have a good support for storing dynamic attributes (hashes) in columns of type JSONB. But sometimes you are missing some kind of validation or lookup possibility (with plain attributes you can use Active Record's built-in validations and have your schema.rb).

One approach about being more strict with dynamic attributes is to use JSON Schema validations. Here is an example, where a project has the dynamic attributes analytic_stats, that we can use to store analytics from an external measurement tool.

• A g...

When you have two inputs, where one contains the name of the other (eg. Name and Name with special treatment), Capybara's fill_in method will fail with the following message:

Ambiguous match, found 2 elements matching visible field "Name" that is not disabled (Capybara::Ambiguous)

You can force Capybara to match exactly what you are typing (which makes your tests better anyways) with match: :prefer_exact:

name = 'Name'
value = 'Bettertest Cucumberbatch'
fill_in(field, with: value, match: :prefer_exact)

Furthermore...

1. Install the latest bundler version:

   gem install bundler
   Fetching bundler-2.3.5.gem
   Successfully installed bundler-2.3.5
   1 gem installed
   

2. Update the bundler version in Gemfile.lock:

   bundle update --bundler  
   

3. Confirm it worked:

   $ tail -n2 Gemfile.lock 
   BUNDLED WITH
     2.3.5
   

Notes:

• Bundler should automatically detect the latest installed version. If it does not, you can specify your preferred version like so:

  b...
  

Rubygems supports a 2FA for your account. Once enabled you need to provide your personal OTP code for every release. Despite the CLI of the rake release task does not work well with the command prompt for your OTP code with Bundler versions < 2.0.2. It just looks like the task is frozen:

• Workaround 1: Just type your OTP code and hit enter, your gem is released afterwards.
• Workaround 2: Upgrade to Bundler >= 2.0.2.. Your supported Ruby versions for this gem must be >= 2.3.

When r...

The Ruby standard lib ships with a YAML Parser called Psych. But serializing and deserializing data seems not as obvious as if you are using JSON.

To safely write and read YAML files you should use Psych#dump (String#to_yaml) and Psych.safe_load (YAML.safe_load):

data = {'key' => 'value'}.to_yaml
=> "---\nkey: value\n"
YAML.safe_load(data)
=> {"key"=>"value"}

Unfortunately you might encounter a few pitfalls which are not obvious in the first place. All of them are a side effect that you can not configure Psych#dump to o...

Introduction

Most of the time it is a tedious task to apply a code style guide to an existing code base as there are likely to be a lot of conflicts. At makandra we are using makandra-rubocop to have code style checks. Here is some advice on how to add makandra-rubocop efficiently.

Note

RubyMine by default has a Rubocop inspection with rules that we don't always agree with. We recommend replacing this with makandra-rubocop or disabling the inspection.
...

When using Chrome for Selenium tests, the chromedriver binary will be used to control Chrome. To debug problems that stem from Selenium's Chrome and/or Chromedriver, you might want to enable logging for the chromedriver itself. Here is how.

Option 1: Use Selenium::WebDriver::Service

In your test setup, you may already have something like Capybara::Selenium::Driver.new(@app, browser: :chrome, options: ...), especially when passing options like device emulation.

Similar to options, simply add an extra key service and pass an inst...

The ruby sass gem also installs a command line tool to convert to and from SCSS. Use it for a directory of .scss-files like

sass-convert -R assets/stylesheets --from scss --to sass

Rails is split into a large number of (sub-) frameworks.

The most important and central of those are

• activesupport (extends the Ruby standard library)
• activerecord / activemodel (ORM for Rails)
• actionview / actionpack (controller / views)
• actionmailer (sends mails)

However, there are also some more situational frameworks included, such as

• actioncable (real time communications using websockets)
• actionmailbox (receives mails)
• actiontext (support for WYSIWYG text editor)
• activejob (background jobs)
• activestorage (file uplo...

When upgrading Clearance, pay attention whether the password hashing strategy might have changed. Old clearance versions (< 1.0) used SHA1-encrypted passwords by default. Current versions default to BCrypt.

If you simply upgrade without taking this into account, users will get a BCrypt::Errors::InvalidHash when trying to sign in. Your tests will not notice this, since they create new users for each scenario.

To fix it, you'll either have to force all users to reset their passwords, or you can allow old users to keep signing in with t...

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...

RubyMine comes with a nice way to grep through your project's files: The finder (ctrl + shift + f). Don't be discouraged about the notice 100+ matches in n+ files if your searched keyword is too general or widely used in your project.

RubyMine comes with a few ways to narrow down the resulting list, don't hesitate to apply those filters to speed up your search. Your keybinding might vary based on your personal settings.

File mask (alt + k)

If you already know the file extension of your ...

The gem json fails to install for Ruby 2.5 if you use a version equal or below 1.8.3.

Run bundle update json --conservative to solve this issue.

The backtrace you will encounter looks like this:

Building native extensions. This could take a while...
ERROR:  Error installing json:
	ERROR: Failed to build gem native extension.

    current directory: /home/user/.rbenv/versions/2.5.3/lib/ruby/gems/2.5.0/gems/json-1.8.3/ext/json/ext/generator
/home/user/.rbenv/versions/2.5.3/bin/ruby -I /home/user/.rbenv/versions/2.5.3/lib/ruby/si...

Travis changed their default distribution from Ubuntu 14.04 (trusty) to 16.04 (precise). This might break your test setup for new builds.

You can solve this issue by freezing your test distribution in the .travis.yml to Ubuntu 14.04 until you have the time to solve all the issues you will have in 16.04:

dist: trusty

Error details

Here are few indicators that you ran into this issue:

Connection to the PostgreSQL database does not work anymore

Your travis-ci builds might have started failing on the usual

psql -c...