• Ctrl + R Search commands you entered previously. Press Ctrl + R again to search further back, Ctrl + Shift + R searches forward again.

• Ctrl + W Deletes from the cursor position to the left.

• Ctrl + _ Undo. Yes, this also works with a German keyboard layout.

• Ctrl + L Clear screen.

• Ctrl + D _Close shell. (EOT, just like in many other shells.) Note: if you dove into another shell (e.g. with sudo su username) you will close it and return to ...

Sometimes you inherit a non Rails or non Rack based web app such as PHP, Perl, Java / JEE, etc. I like using cucumber for functional testing so I put together this project structure to use as a starting point for testing non Ruby web based applications.

If a controller action responds to other formats than HTML (XML, PDF, Excel, JSON, ...), you can reach that code in a controller spec like this:

describe UsersController do
  describe '#index' do
    it 'should be able to send an excel file' do
       # stubs and expectations go here
       get :index, :format => 'xls'
    end
  end
end

Remember that both the :format parameter and the HTTP_ACCEPT header can m...

You will need to upgrade to RSpec >= 2 and rspec-rails >= 2 for Rails 3. Here are some hints to get started:

• In RSpec 2 the executable is rspec, not spec.
• RSpec and rspec-rails have been completely refactored internally. All RSpec classes have been renamed from Spec::Something to RSpec::Something. This also means that every require 'spec/something' must now be require 'rspec/something'.
• In spec_helper.rb, Spec::Runner.configure becomes RSpec.configure
• It has become really hard to extend specific example groups ...

If you previously used version 2.x of Thunderbird and upgraded to 3.x (for example through an Ubuntu release upgrade) you might notice that Thunderbird will not show any of your old e-mails or settings.

This results from a different directory being used for storing profiles and configuration.

You can replace the blank profile with your old one like this:
cd ~
mv .thunderbird .thunderbird-invalid
cp -R .mozilla-thunderbird .thunderbird

Upon its next start, Thunderbird brings up the migration wizard introducing you to a few vers...

If you did file operations inside a shell or for example using Nautilus, it can take quite a while until RubyMine takes note of them and updates things like your project tree or its internal file list.

Flushing file system buffers helps you out (run it from a terminal):
sync

This is also possibly via the RubyMine menus: File → Synchronize.

Take care when trying to set attributes to nil in a blueprint.

Given the following master blueprint:
Story.blueprint do
title
author { User.make }
editor { User.make }
end

This approach will not overwrite/remove the editor defined in the master blueprint:
Story.blueprint(:draft) do
editor nil
end

...whereas this one will (note the lambda):
Story.blueprint(:draft) do
editor { nil }
end

Sometimes the order in which strings appear on a page matters to you.

Spreewald gives you steps like these:

Then I should see in this order:
  | Alpha Group |
  | Augsburg    |
  | Berlin      |
  | Beta Group  |

Or, if you prefer multiline strings:

Then I should see in this order:
  """
  Alpha Group
  Augsburg
  Berlin
  Beta Group
  """

The step ignores all HTML tags and only tests on plain text.

Note: We are talking about Machinist 1 here, Machinist 2 may have solved this or might require a different approach.

Machinist allows named blueprints (e.g. User.blueprint(:admin)) that inherit from the master blueprint (User.blueprint).

If you also want to inherit from another blueprint (e.g. if "vip" should load "premium" and the master blueprint) you can do this:
User.blueprint(:vip) do
# Fields for the vip blueprint go her...

If you want to see how long your database queries actually take, you need to disable MySQL's query cache. This can be done globally by logging into a database console, run

SET GLOBAL query_cache_type=OFF;

and restart your rails server.

You can also disable the cache on a per query basis by saying

SELECT SQL_NO_CACHE * FROM ...

You also probably want to disable Rails internal (per-request) cache. For this, wrap your code with a call to ActiveRecord::Base.uncached. For example, as an around_filter:

d...

Even when you're using bundler, it might be significant in which order your gems are listed in your Gemfile. This can happen when gems are running around calling require or require_dependency on other gems or application classes when loaded (don't do that!).

A known culprit of this is the (otherwise wonderful) resource_controller gem, which requires ApplicationController when loaded. When your ApplicationController requires later-loaded gems when loaded, Rails will not boot.

He...

Inside before :each blocks you can refer to variables that you introduce via let later on.

They do not need to be defined ahead of your before block and can be different for individual sections.

It works just like that:

describe User do
  describe '#locked?' do
    
    before :each do
      subject.should_receive(:current_plan).and_return plan
    end
    
    context 'when expiring today' do
      let(:plan) { stub(:expiry => Date.today) }
      it 'should be false' do
        subject....

If a SSH shell dies (from timeout for example), you cannot kill it with the usual CTRL-C or CTRL-Z. Instead, press
[ENTER]~.
(That is ENTER TILDE PERIOD).

These steps are now part of Spreewald.

This note describes a Cucumber step that lets you write this:

Then I should see a table with the following rows:
  | Bruce Wayne       | Employee    | 1972 |
  | Harleen Quinzel   | HR          | 1982 |
  | Alfred Pennyworth | Engineering | 1943 |

If there are additional columns or rows in the table that are not explicitely expected, the step won't complain. It does however expect the rows to be ordered as stat...

A popular ruby idiom I keep stumbling upon is
def do_some_thing_for(values)
values = Array(values)
values.each { ... }
end

The intent is to allow the user to pass in arrays as well as scalar values, since
Array("foo") == ["foo"]
Array(["foo", "bar"]) == ["foo", "bar"]

But Array() actually calls to_a on its arguments, which may not always do what you expect. For example
Array("foo \n bar") == ["foo \n", "bar"]

Both these approaches will keep your GET parameters -- and will only work for GET requests.

• Capybara:

  When /^I reload the page$/ do
    visit [ current_path, page.driver.request.env['QUERY_STRING'] ].reject(&:blank?).join('?')
  end
  

• Webrat:

  When /^I reload the page$/ do
    visit url_for(request.params)
  end
  

For a step that distinguishes between drivers (Selenium, Rack::Test, Culerity), check [n4k3d.com](http://n4k3d.com/blog/2011/02/02/reloading-the-page-in-cucumber-with-capybara-and-seleniu...

RSpec's context (which is basically an alias for describe) takes over your whole application. No object may have its own context method, or you will always receive errors like

"No description supplied for example group declared on ~/project/app/..."

The easiest workarounds:

• do not name any method context
• use describe instead of context in your specs, and put this into your spec_helper.rb:\
  Spec::DSL::Main.class_eval do
  if method_defined? :context
  undef :context
  end
  end

Rails 2

You can use

record.send(:update_without_callbacks)

or

record.send(:create_without_callbacks)

This can be used as a lightweight alternative to machinist's make or FactoryGirl's create, when you just need objects in the database but don't care about any callbacks or validations. Note that create_without_callbacks does not return the object, so you might want to do

record = Record.new.tap(&:create_without_callbacks)

Rails 3

Rails 3 no longer comes with update_without_callbacks or `crea...

We use RTeX for PDF exports.
While converting LaTeX to PDF, RTeX opens a temporary file which has problematic permissions: Both group and world can read those files.

Although the temp files should go away they sometimes live longer than one would expect.
We patched RTeX to fix this (and have more secure permissions). Place the code below into config/initializers/rtex.rb

With its you can switch the subject of an example to a method value of the current subject:

describe Array do
  its(:length) { should == 0 }
end

stub_chain is the tie to go along with should_receive_chain's tux:

object.stub_chain(:first, :second, :third).and_return(:this)

You can restore the original implementation of stubbed methods with unstub:

object.stub(:foo => 'bar')
# ...
object.unstub(:foo)

In recent RSpecs ...

Find conditions for scopes can be given either as an array (:conditions => ['state = ?', 'draft']) or a hash (:conditions => { 'state' => 'draft' }). The later is nicer to read, but has horrible security implications in some versions of Ruby on Rails.

Affected versions

Use like this:

power-rake db:migrate VERSION=20100913132321

By default the environments development, test, cucumber and performance are considered. The script will not run rake on a production or staging environment.

This script is part of our geordi gem on github.

To only run a single describe/context block in a long spec, you can say

spec spec/models/note_spec.rb:545

... where the describe block starts at line 545.

Note: This will only run examples that are direct children of this block, not descendants further down (when nesting describe/context blocks).

You may also pass the line of an it block to run this exact one.

There are many different methods that allow mapping an Array to a Hash in Ruby.

Array#to_h with a block (Ruby 2.6+)

You can call an array with a block that is called with each element. The block must return a [key, value] tuple.

This is useful if both the hash key and value can be derived from each array element:

users = User.all
user_names_by_id = users.to_h { |user| [user.id, user.name] }

{
  1 => "Alice",
  2 => "Bob"
}

Array#to_h on an array of key/value tuples (Ruby 2.1+)

Converts an Array ...