Note that you cannot currently use Ruby 1.9.2 with Rails 2 applications that use RSpec, so don't upgrade if that is your setup. The rspec-rails gem has a fatal bug that was only fixed for rspec-rails-2.x, which only supports Rails 3. There is no fix for the rspec-rails-1.3.x series of the gem which supports Rails 2.

Anyway, here are upgrade instructions if you only work with Rails 3 or don't use RSpec. You will lose all your gems in the process, but you can get them back easily if you h...

When using threads, you must make your code thread-safe. This can be done by either locking (mutexes) all data shared between threads, or by only using immutable data structures. Ruby core classes like String or Array are not immutable.

There are several gems providing thread-safe collection classes in Ruby.

concurrent-ruby

The concurrent-ruby gem provides thread-safe versions of Array and Hash:

sa = Concurrent::Array.new # supports standard Array.new forms
sh = Co...

Capistrano 3 is a major rework of the framework and requires several adjustments to your deploy configuration files. The biggest change is that they moved away from their custom DSL and use Rake instead. For connecting with and operating on the servers, they bring a new gem SSHKit which does the heavy lifting. It's SSHKit's DSL that is used anywhere inside the Rake tasks. See #Resources at the bottom for examples.

Step 1: Upgrade guide

For migration from 2 to 3, follow this tutorial: [Capistrano 3 Upgrade Guide](https://semaphorec...

Why

We have projects that have been developed using many different versions of Ruby. Since we do not want to constantly update every old project, we need to have many Ruby versions installed on our development machines.

Rbenv does that for us.

How it works

Rbenv installs ruby version and ruby gems to ~/.rbenv/versions/VERSION_NUMBER/.... This way many different Rubies can be installed at once.

When you run ruby or gem or bundler or any other Ruby binary

• rbenv looks for a file...

Normally you can list all gems of the current ruby version with gem list, which also includes the gems of you Gemfile. These can be uninstalled with gem uninstall gemname.

List and uninstall a gem installed via Bundler from Github

This does not work for gems installed directly from Github. They do not appear in gem list.

Show all gems installed via Github by bundler:

ls ~/.rbenv/versions/2.4.1/lib/ruby/gems/2.4.0/bundler/

Remove a gem installed via Github by Bundler:

rm -rf ~/.rbenv/versions/2.4.1/lib/ruby/gems/2....

In case you want to require a gem, that is not in the Gemfile of you bundle and therefore not in your loadpath, you need to add the path manually and require the gem afterwards.

Expected error

Requiring a gem, that is not in the Gemfile or .gemspec, will cause an LoadError exception:

require 'example_gem' => LoadError: cannot load such file -- example_gem

Adding a gem to the loadpath temporary

1. You need to install the gem

gem install 'example_gem'

2. Then you need to require the path where the gem was install...

This is an awesome gadget in your toolbox, even if your test coverage is great.

• gem install ruby-debug (Ruby 1.8) or gem install debugger (Ruby 1.9)
• Start your server with script/server --debugger
• Set a breakpoint by invoking debugger anywhere in your code
• Open your application in the browser and run the code path that crosses the breakpoint
• Once you reach the breakpoint, the page loading will seem to "hang".
• Switch to the shell you started the server with. That shell will be running an irb session where you can step thr...

You can hook into Slack when using Capistrano for deployment. The slackistrano gem does most of the heavy lifting for you. Its default messages are unobtrusive and can be adjusted easily.

When deploying, it posts to a Slack channel like this:

How to integrate

Integrating Slackistrano with Capistrano 3 is fairly simple.

1. In your Slack, open menu → A...

Firefox 5.0.1, which we were using for most Rails 2.3 projects, does not run on Ubuntu 14.04 any more. Here is how to update affected projects.

1. Update (or create) .firefox-version with the content: 24.0
   If you haven't installed Firefox 24 yet, the next time you run tests with Geordi, it will tell you how to install it.

2. On a Rails 2 project:

   • Update your Cucumber-related gems as described in Upgrading Cucumber and Capybara, including cucumber_spinner and launchy.

   • If you...

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...

In case you want to use pry with an older version of Ruby, you can try the following configurations.

Ruby 1.8.7

Your pry version must not be greater than 0.9.10.

gem 'pry', '=0.9.10'
gem 'ruby-debug', '=0.10.4'
gem "ruby-debug-pry", :require => "ruby-debug/pry"
gem 'pry-nav'
gem 'ruby18_source_location'

Ruby 1.9.3

Your pry version must not be greater than 0.9.9.

gem 'debugger', '=1.1.4'
gem 'pry-debugger', '=0.2.0'
gem 'pry', '=0.9.9'

Known errors

No source for ruby-1...

When a Ruby version gem has a letter in its version number, it is considered a pre-release:

• 1.0.0.rc1
• 2.3.0.alpha2
• 3.0.0.beta3
• 4.0.0.pre.rc2

Even if a pre-release gem has the highest version number, it is never installed unless the user explictily requested the version:

gem install foobar --version="=2.3.0.alpha2"

Also bundle update will never update a stable version to a pre-release version unless the user explicitly requests it in the Gemfile:

gem 'foobar', '=2.3.0.alpha2'

A note on Semanti...

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...
   

Plugins (and gems) are typically tested using a complete sample rails application that lives in the spec folder of the plugin. If your gem is supposed to work with multiple versions of Rails, you might want to use to separate apps - one for each rails version.

For best practice examples that give you full coverage with minimal repitition of code, check out our gems has_defaults and assignable_values. In particular, take a look at:

• Multiple `sp...

You can use rake --where task to find the source location that defines task:

bundle exec rake --where assets:precompile
rake assets:precompile              /home/henning/.rbenv/versions/2.6.6/lib/ruby/gems/2.6.0/gems/precompiled_assets-0.2.1/lib/precompiled_assets/tasks/assets.rake:5:in `block in <main>'

So you got this error, even though your Gemfile bundles mysql2:

!!! Missing the mysql2 gem. Add it to your Gemfile: gem 'mysql2'

or

Please install the mysql adapter: `gem install activerecord-mysql-adapter` (mysql is not part of the bundle. Add it to Gemfile.)

The reason for this confusing error message is probably that your Gemfile says mysql2, but your database.yml still uses the mysql adapter. Change it to use the mysql2 adapter:

development:
  adapter: mysql2
  database: myproject_developm...

When you get an error like this:

Invalid gemspec in [/opt/www/foo-project.makandra.de/shared/bundle/ruby/1.8/specifications/carrierwave-0.6.2.gemspec]: Illformed requirement ["#<YAML::Syck::DefaultKey:0x7fda6f84d2e8> 1.1.4"]

... the machine's Rubygems needs to be updated.

If that happens on your local machine

• Manually remove the offending's gem files and specifications. The paths will be something like /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/your-broken-gem and `/usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/specificatio...

In newer passenger versions the output of passenger -v has changed. capistrano-passenger tries to parse the version and now causes the error undefined method '[]' for nil:NilClass. To fix this you only need to upgrade the capistrano-passenger gem.

Therefore run bundle update capistrano-passenger --conservative.

The version change of passenger from 6.0.7 to 6.0.8 has triggered this problem. This is fixed in capistrano-passenger >= 0.2.1.

Capybara added a deprecation warning in version 3.35.3 (version from 2019) that shows up if your selector is not of type String or Symbol.

Example:

click_link(10) # bad
click_link("10") # good

You might encounter this error e.g. in a pagination step or similar where you want to click on numbers. To figure out where this deprecation warning comes from try to run the tests with a step output.

bundle exec parallel_cucumber --test-options "--format=pretty" feature

The deprecation message looks like following:

Locator In...

When trying to install the gherkin gem, you might encounter an error with the following lines:

ERROR:  Error installing gherkin:
	ERROR: Failed to build gem native extension.
...
checking for main() in -lc... yes
creating Makefile
...
cc1: all warnings being treated as errors
Makefile:150: recipe for target 'gherkin_lexer_ar.o' failed
make: *** [gherkin_lexer_ar.o] Error 1
...

If upgrading is not an option, configure build options for gherkin:

bundle config --local build.gherkin --with-cflags=-w

Your .bundle/config fi...

Simplecov is a code coverage tool. This helps you to find out which parts of your application are not tested.

Integrating this in a rails project with rspec, cucumber and parallel_tests is easy.

1. Add it to your Gemfile and bundle

   group :test do
     gem 'simplecov', require: false
   end
   

2. Add a .simplecov file in your project root:

   SimpleCov.start 'rails' do
     # any custom configs like groups and filters can be here at a central place
     enable_cov...