Rails' Strong Parameters enable you to allow only specific values from request params to e.g. avoid mass assignment.

Usually, you say something like params.permit(:email, :password) and any extra parameters would be ignored, e.g. when calling to_h.
This is excellent and you should definitely use it.

What is permit! and why is it dangerous?

However, there is also params.permit! whic...

Newest versions of Chromedriver breaks the user agent for device emulation via device name. In previous versions the user agent of the emulated device was set. In the newest versions the user agent differs from the emulated device.

• Version Chrome: 116.0.5845.110
• Version Chromedriver: 116.0.5845.96
• Bug: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromedriver/issues/detail?id=4550&q=userAgent&can=2
• Setting: https://chromedriver.chromium.org/capabilities

In Capybara an affected config looks like following:

Capybara.register_driver :mobi...

An introduction to mangling

When you minify ("compress", "optimize") your JavaScript for production, the names of your functions and variables will be renamed for brevity. This process is often called mangling.

E.g. if this is your source code:

function function1() {
  function2()
}

After mangling it would look like this:

function a() {
  b()
}

Object properties are not mangled by default

Minfiers never mangle properties by default, as this can be an unsafe transformation. This leads to larger file sizes if...

In CI test runs I noticed that string sorting order changed after switching from a debian-based PostgreSQL docker image to one that is based on Alpine Linux.

Debian image sorting: bar Bar foo Foo
Alpine image sorting: Bar Foo bar foo

Explanation

Alpine Linux is a very slim linux distribution that results in small docker image sizes (roughly 100MB instead of 150MB), so it's a popular choice. However, it does not have all comman locales installed and does not use all locales that a user installs by default.
Postgres orders string co...

You can tell npm to install a package globally with npm -g install @puppeteer/browsers. However, it seems that its not possible that npx can run commands from global packages without referencing the global package path.

Example

Installing @puppeteer/browsers globally:

$ npm -g install @puppeteer/browsers

The globally installed package @puppeteer/browsers can not be access via npx:

$ npx --no-install @puppeteer/browsers

npm ERR! canceled # Error message when package is not installed

But it is installed g...

Background

Rails offers several methods to manage three types of different cookies along with a session storage for cookies. These are normal, signed and encrypted cookies.

By following the happy path of testing a web application, that is only the main use-case is tested as a integration test and the rest as isolated (more unit ...

If you want to collapse/expand elements with dynamic content (and thus unknown height), you can not transition between height: 0 and height: auto.

Doing it properly, with modern CSS features

In the past, you might have resorted to bulky JavaScript solutions or CSS hacks like transitioning between max-height: 0 and max-height: 9999px. All of them were awkward and/or have several edge cases.

With modern CSS, there is actually a way to do it properly:
Just use a display: grid container which transitions its grid row height betwe...

Note: You won't need this for single lines of text. In this case it is better to just use the text-overflow property: Use CSS "text-overflow" to truncate long texts

You can use -webkit-line-clamp in your CSS/SASS to natively render an ellipsis (...) after a specific amount of lines for a multi-line text in your HTML.
Earlier, it was necessary to implement JavaScript solutions like Superclamp.js to enable this because the browser support has been rather limited...

Sometimes you'll find yourself with a set of tasks that require similar code for different models. For example, if you start working at a new application that allows CRUDing pears and apples, each commit might look similar to this:

commit 41e3adef10950b324ae09e308f632bef0dee3f87 (HEAD -> ml/add-apples-12345)
Author: Michael Leimstaedtner <michael.leimstaedtner@acme.com>
Date:   Fri Aug 11 09:42:34 2023 +0200

    Add Apples as a new fruit

diff --git a/app/models/apple.rb b/app/models/apple.rb
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..a51...

When you write your next CarrierWave uploader, consider processing your images with libvips instead of ImageMagick.

Reasons for libvips

There are several upsides to using libvips over ImageMagick:

• libvips is considerably faster and uses less memory.
• ImageMagick has a large attack surface that has repeatedly caused security incidents in the past (compare [ImageMagick CVEs](https://www....

Using querySelector or querySelectorAll in JavaScript, you can easily find descendants of a node that match a given selector.

But what if you want to find only children (i.e. direct descendants) of an element?
Easy: use :scope. It references the element on which DOM API methods are being called:

element.querySelectorAll(':scope > .your-selector')

Example

Consider this HTML

<body>
  <div id="container1">
    <div id="container1a">foo</div>
    <div id="container1b">bar</div>
    <div id="container1c">baz</...

So you have a heading that is just barely wider than the container it should fit into, and it wraps a single word to a new line and it's not really pretty?
Cry no more, for you can use text-wrap: balance today to fix that. At least in some browsers.

When browsers encounter a text-wrapping element with text-wrap: balance style, they will try breaking to a new line sooner, if it balances out the width of lines.

text-wrap: unset	text-wrap: balance
	![Image](/makandr...

We have a long-standing checklist for merge requests. However, it hardly matches the intricate requirements for design. This checklist fills the gap.

Before starting implementing, look at all designs: are there components similar to yours? Have they already been implemented? Can you build on this prior art when implementing yours?

Checklist: I confirm my design implementation

• has been tested manually by me
• adheres to the code style of the project (e.g. BEM)
• avoids "magic numbers" (don't say e.g. ...

It most cases it's not necessary to add a version constraint next to your packages in the package.json. Since all versions are saved in a lockfile, everyone running yarn install will get exactly the same versions. Yarn saves this lockfile as yarn.lock and npm as package-lock.json.

There are some exceptions, where you can consider adding a version constraint to the package.json:

• You are not checking the lockfile into version control (not recommended)
• A specific package has a bug in a more recent version
• You want to ensure no...

It most cases it's not necessary to add a version constraint next to your gems in the Gemfile. Since all versions are saved in the Gemfile.lock, everyone running bundle install will get exactly the same versions.

There are some exceptions, where you can consider adding a version constrain to the Gemfile:

• You are not checking in the Gemfile.lock into the version control (not recommended)
• A specific gem has a bug in a more recent version (adding a comment for the reason is highly recommended)
• You want to ensure no one upgrade...

Code splitting is a feature of esbuild that can keep huge libraries out of the main bundle.

How code splitting works

Like Webpack esbuild lets you use the await import() function to load code on demand:

// application.js
const { fun } = await import('library.js')

fun()

However, esbuild's code splitting is disabled by default. The code above would simply inline (copy) `l...

As we are slowly switching from Cucumber scenarios to RSpec feature specs, you might be tempted to write assertions like this one:

feature 'authorization for cards management' do
  let(:guest_user) { create(:user, :guest) }

  scenario "rejects guest users from adding new cards", js: true do
    sign_in guest_user

    expect { visit new_cards_path }.to raise_error(Consul::Powerless)
  end
end

While this might work under certain circumstances¹, there is a good chance you'll see two exceptions when running this single spec:

• ...

Context and further resources

Even though you can get 90% of debugging done with up to 5 basic byebug commands, it comes in handy with it's features for many use cases beyond that to make your life easier.

For this cheatsheat I tried to structure the most useful commands by different use cases, such that a practical oriented overview of all the commands can be gathered by going over this cheatsheet. For some commands I added some tips for their usage and further details on their subcommands

• For most of the commands shortl...

I recently noticed that better_errors allows you to to open files from within your favorite editor. However it was not so easy to get rubymine:// links to work on Gnome/Linux. Here is how it finally worked for me:

Step 1: Add a Desktop launcher

Add this file to ~/.local/share/applications/rubymine.desktop:

[Desktop Entry]
Version=1.0
T...

Debugging your integration tests, that run a headless Chrome inside a docker image, is tricky.

In many cases you can connect your Chrome to a remote docker container like docker-selenium, which should be the preferred way when you try to inspect a page within your integration test.

Otherwise you might be able to start your docker container with --net=host and access your local chromedriver in the host address space host.docker.internal.

If both options above don't work for you here is a...

Within Capybara you most certainly use the #check- and #uncheck-method to (un)check checkboxes.
But there's one problem, if you want to test a custom styled checkbox, which hides its <input>-Tag:

• The methods cannot (un)check checkboxes without an visible <input>.
• The error message will be something like: Unable to find visible checkbox "Some label" that is not disabled

Solution 1

Use the keyword argument allow_label_click: true within the method call.
So instead of check('Some label'), use `check('Some label', allow...

Looking at the source code of the validates_numericality_of validator, it becomes clear that it converts the attribute in question to either an integer or float:

if configuration[:only_integer]
  unless raw_value.to_s =~ /\A[+-]?\d+\Z/
    record.errors.add(attr_name, configuration[:message] || ActiveRecord::Errors.default_error_messages[:not_a_number])
    next
  end
  raw_value = raw_value.to_i
else
 begin
    raw_value = Kernel.Float(raw_val...

When you allow file uploads in your app, a user might upload content that hurts other users.

Our primary concern here is users uploading .html or .svg files that can run JavaScript and possibly hijack another user's session.

A secondary concern is that malicious users can upload executables (like an .exe or .scr file) and use your server to distribute it. However, modern operating systems usually warn before executing files that were downloaded from t...

Every Rails response has a default ETag header. In theory this would enable caching for multiple requests to the same resource. Unfortunately the default ETags produced by Rails are effectively random, meaning they can never match a future request.

Understanding ETags

When your Rails app responds with ETag headers, future requests to the same URL can be answered with an empty response if the underlying content ha...