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...

You can share a state in Ruby with global variables. Even if you should avoid them whenever possible, for debugging an application this could be temporary quite handy.

Example:

class User

  after_save { byebug if $debug; nil }

  def lock
   self.locked = true
   save
  end

end

Rspec.describe User do

  let(:user) { create(:user) } 

  before do
   # Many users are created and saved in this hook, but we don't want the debugger to stop for them...

When an AJAX request raises an exception on the server, Rails will show a minimal error page with only basic information. Because all Unpoly updates work using AJAX requests, you won't get the more detailled better_errors page with the interactive REPL.

Below is an event listener that automatically repeats the request as a full-page load if your development error shows an error page. This means you get...

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 ...

If rspec hangs with no output and you dont get a backtrace neither with --backtrace nor by just killing it with crtl-c,
you can put the following in your spec/spec_helper.rb:

puts "rspec pid: #{Process.pid}"

trap 'USR1' do
  threads = Thread.list

  puts
  puts "=" * 80
  puts "Received USR1 signal; printing all #{threads.count} thread backtraces."

  threads.each do |thr|
    description = thr == Thread.main ? "Main thread" : thr.inspect
    puts
    puts "#{description} backtrace: "
    puts thr.backtrace.join("\n")
  end

...

In Ruby on Rails, all objects have a useful blank? method. It returns true for nil but also for empty strings or empty arrays. There is also a universal method present? which returns true for all values that are not blank?.

In JavaScript you need to roll your own implementation of blank? and present?.

If your application uses [Unpoly](...

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...

Not all versions of Node.js are compatible with each other. Also npm packages may require a minimum or maximum version of Node.js. We use nvm on our development PCs so we can operate multiple versions of Node.js in parallel.

To make sure that all developers use a compatible version of Node.js, your Rails project should declare the required Node.js in a file called .nvmrc.

When a .nvmrc exists, developers can cd in your project directory and activate...

When installing a gem you can use version comparators like >= or ~>. That way it is possible to fetch the latest version of Bundler 1 with this command:

gem install bundler -v '~>1'

How to install bundler for Ruby < 2.3 is a common usecase where you might need Bundler 1.

Cucumber up to version 2 had a neat feature called Step Argument Transforms which was dropped in favor of Cucumber 3 ParameterTypes. While I strongly encourage you to drop your legacy Transforms when upgrading to Cucumber 3, it might not always be possible due to their different design.
This is a guide on how to keep the exact same functionality of your old Transforms while writing them in the style of new `Paramet...

If you get requests with values for formats like this:

{:locale=>[:de], :formats=>["../../../../../../../../../../etc/services{{"], :variants=>[], :handlers=>[:erb, :builder, :raw, :ruby, :coffee, :haml]}

or fails like this:

Invalid query parameters: invalid %-encoding (../../../../../../../../../etc/passwd%%0000.html)

Someone tries to exploit CVE-2019-5418.
If you use the latest Rails (or latest Rails LTS) you're...

Download buttons can be difficult to test, especially with Selenium. Depending on browser, user settings and response headers, one of three things can happen:

• The browser shows a "Save as..." dialog. Since it is a modal dialog, we can no longer communicate with the browser through Selenium.
• The browser automatically downloads the file without prompting the user. For the test it looks like nothing has happened.
• The browser shows a binary document in its own window, like a PDF. Capybara/Selenium freaks out because there is no HTML docum...

An alternative of using a multiple assignment for a Regex are named groups. Especially when your Regex becomes more complicates it is easier to understand and to process.

Note:

• In case a string does not match the pattern, .match will return nil.
• With Ruby 2.4 the result of .match can be transformed to a Hash with named_captures. This allows you to use methods like slice or fetch on the result.

Example with a mult...

Tod is a gem for working with daytimes.

Another additional gem?

Thus SQL has a time datatype for storing time of day in the format hh:mm:ss, neither Ruby nor Rails themselves offer an elegant way to deal with day times.

Time and DateTime both handle daytime values AND calendar date, using them to only store the time of day will end in inconsistent and thus confusing data, e. g. Time.new will initialize with the current Time in your Timezone, DateTime.new initializes at January 1, at an undefined year, without a timezone o...

When doing some meta-programming magic and you want to do something for all attributes of a class, you may need to access connection or some of its methods (e.g. columns) during class definition.

While everything will be fine while you are working on a project that is in active development, the application will fail to boot when the database is missing or has no tables. This means that Raketasks like db:create or db:migrate fail on a freshly cloned project.

The reason is your environment.rb which is loaded for Raketasks and calls...

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...