GitHub Actions: Retrying a failing step
If you have a flaky command you can use the nick-invision/retry to re-try a failing command, optionally with a timeout:
---
...
jobs:
test:
...
steps:
- name: Run tests
uses: nick-invision/retry@v2
with:
timeout_seconds: 30
max_attempts: 3
command: bundle exec rake spec
Run a script on the server
You have to specify the environment with -e env_name
or RAILS_ENV=env_name
if you want to run a script on the server.
at Rails 2 it's script/runner
bundle exec script/runner -e env_name path/to/script.rb argument1 argument2 ...
at Rails 3 it's rails runner
RAILS_ENV=env_name bundle exec rails runner path/to/script.rb argument1 argument2 ...
How to make sure that manual deploy tasks (scheduled in Pivotal Tracker) are executed on deploy (with Capistrano)
We regularly have tasks that need to be performed around a deploy. Be it to notify operations about changed application behavior, be it to run a little oneline script after the deploy. Most database-related stuff can be handled by migrations, but every once in a while, we have tasks that are much easier to be performed manually.
Writing deploy tasks
Here is how we manage the deploy tasks themselves:
- Deploy tasks are written inside the Pivotal Tracker story description, clearly marked (e.g. with a headline "Deploy task")
- We disting...
VCR and the webdrivers gem
If you're using the webdrivers gem and VCR together, depending on your configuration, VCR will yell at you regulary.
The webdrivers gem tries to update your webdrivers on your local machine. To do so, it checks the internet for newer versions, firing an HTTP-request to e.g. https://chromedriver.storage.googleapis.com
You can "fix" this in multiple ways:
-
Update your drivers on your machine with
RAILS_ENV=test rake webdrivers:chromedriver:update
-
Ignore the driver update-URL in your ...
How to configure file watchers in RubyMine
Installation
You need to install the official plugin, it is not bundled with RubyMine by default.
Example: Setup a watcher to verify rubocop integrity
First, open Settings -> Tools -> File Watchers. Then, configure rubocop to check every change to the VCS:
Note that the "program" argument must be part of your $PATH
. I worked around this constraint by using b
as a shim for bundle exec
.
Resources
- [File watchers documen...
Rails: Concurrent requests in development and tests
With puma
you can have concurrent requests. There are two concepts on how Puma can handle two incoming requests: Workers and Threads.
Workers
Puma can have multiple workers. Each worker is a process fork from puma and therefore a very heavy instance and can have multiple threads, that handle the incoming requests.
Example: A Puma server with 2 workers
and 1 thread
each can handle 2 request in parallel
. A third request has to wait until the thread of one of the workers is free.
Threads
Rails is thread-safe since version 4 (n...
Ubuntu: Fix "An error occurred while installing pg"
If you get an error like this:
An error occurred while installing pg (0.17.1), and Bundler cannot continue.
Make sure thatgem install pg -v '0.17.1'
succeeds before bundling.
Then do this:
sudo apt-get install libpq-dev
... and run Bundler again.
Running Rails 2 apps with modern MariaDB SQL server
You might have some trouble running a Rails LTS 2 app with MySQL 5.7.
If you don't want to hack Mysql 5.6 into your modern Ubuntu or use the MySQL sandbox, you might want to try MariaDB 10.x.
MariaDB 10.x should work with both old and new Rails applications.
[Switch to MariaDB](https://makandracards.com/makandra/468343-how-...
Using Solr with Sunspot
This describes all the steps you'll need to get Solr up and running for your project using the Sunspot gem.
Prepare Sunspot on your development machine
What you want in your Gemfile:
gem 'sunspot_rails'
gem 'sunspot_solr'
gem 'progress_bar' # for sunspot:solr:reindex
Now define what should be indexed within Solr from your ActiveRecord models, e.g.,
class Article << ActiveRecord::Base
searchable do
text :title
...
How to checkout submodules in Gitlab CI
Accessing other repositories in Gitlab CI is not straight forward, since the access rights of the current pipeline might not be sufficient enough.
One approach is to use project access tokens and clone the repositories via HTTPS.
-
Create a project access token for all submodules you want to have access to with the setting
read_repository
- Add the secrets as environment variable to the main project you want to have access to submodules:
- Protected
false
...
- Protected
Cronjobs: "Craken" is dead, long live "Whenever"
Our old solution for cronjobs, the "craken" plugin, is no longer maintained and does not work on Rails 3.2+.
We will instead use the whenever gem.
"Whenever" works just like "craken", by putting your rake tasks into the server's cron table. Everything seems to work just like we need it.
Installation for new projects
-
Add "whenever" to your
Gemfile
:group :deploy do gem 'whenever', require: false end
-
Add it to your
config/deploy.rb
:
...
Sprites with Compass
Using CSS sprites for background images is a technique for optimizing page load time by combining smaller images into a larger image sprite.
There are ongoing arguments on how useful this still is, as modern browsers become more comfortable to load images in parallel. However, many major websites still use them, for example amazon, [facebook](...
Using local fonts with Webpack / Webpacker
When we want to use our own (or bought) fonts in an application with Webpack(er), we have two options. We can
- put the fonts directly into your Webpack's assets folder or
- write an npm package with an own sass file that can be imported from the Webpack manifest.
Load fonts from your assets folder
The first option turns out to be straightforward: Import the stylesheets in the index.js of the pack you're using:
// webpack_source_path/application/index.js
import './stylesheets/reset'
import...
Parallel cucumber: How to pass in cucumber arguments
Here is an example with the --tags
option. You need to wrap them inside --cucumber-options
option of parallel_cucumber
.
DISPLAY=:17 bundle exec parallel_cucumber --cucumber-options '--tags @solo' features
See more details in the docs.
How to employ and run your tests with parallel_tests to speed up test execution
When your cucumber features grow massively over time, the test execution can take a lot of time.
One easy way to speed up your test execution is to use the parallel_tests gem.
It comes along with some useful rake tasks that let you setup your local test environment shortly to run your features, specs or unit-tests in parallel.
Follow these steps to get it to work.
-
Add the parallel_tests gem to your
Gemfile
test sections like that:# ./Gemfile group :development, :test do
...
Upgrading Ruby from 1.8.7 to 2.3.5
Suggested Workflow
Set the ruby version in .ruby-version
to 2.3.5, then perform these steps one by one, fixing errors as they occur:
- Update gems as listed below, and bundle
- Boot a Rails console - see below for a list of changes you will probably need
- Run Specs with
--backtrace
option - Run Cucumber features (with Geordi's
--debug
option) - When all tests are green, look through your Gemfile and remove as many version constraints as possible.
- Boot the application in different environements to spot further issues, e...
How to: Fix json 1.8.3 with Ruby 2.5
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...
A few hints when upgrading to Ruby 1.9
Note: If you are currently working with Ruby 1.8.7 or 1.9.3, we recommend to upgrade to Ruby 2.1 first. From our experience this upgrade is much smoother than the jump from 2.1 and 2.2, while still giving your the huge performance gains of Ruby 2. Also, if you're on Ruby 1.8.7, we recommend to skip a troublesome upgrade to 1.9.3 and go straight to 2.1.
When trying to make a Rails app run on Ruby 1.9, you're likely to encounter several issues. Here are a few solutions (obviously not exhaustive):
When running `bundle ...
Plotting graphs in Ruby with Gruff
Geoffrey Grosenbach has created Gruff for easily plotting graphs. It is written in pure Ruby and integrates with Rails applications.
It provides features as automatic sizing of dots and lines (the more values, the thinner the graph's elements), custom or predefined themes, different styles (bar, line, dot and many more) and multiple graphs in one chart.
Installation
In your Gemfile:
gem 'rmagick', :require => false
gem 'gruff'
Then run bundle install
(and don't forget to restart your development server.)
Usage
This i...
Update: Shell script to deploy changes to production and not shoot yourself in the foot
deploy-to-production
now calls Capistrano with bundle exec
since we started to bundle Capistrano in all projects.
Installing therubyracer and libv8 with Ruby 1.8 on OSX Mavericks
There seems to be no way to use therubyracer -v '0.11.4'
and libv8 -v '3.11.8.17'
on OS X Mavericks.
However, running bundle update therubyracer
worked for me. It installed therubyracer -v '0.12.1'
and libv8 -v '3.16.14.3'
and I had not side effects.
Log of my attempts to get it working
Probably you got here when bundling failed building native extensions for therubyracer
.
The libv8
(3.3.10.4) should have been installed when bundling. Unfortunately it is not building correctly on Mavericks, so the libv8.a
f...
chromedriver-helper gem in Gemfile might break you selenium tests (of other projects)
Summary: Don't add chromedriver-helper to the Gemfile
- the executables might break your tests in projects where
chromedriver-helper
is not in the Gemfile - developers with different chrome versions will have problems using the same
chromedriver-helper
version
Background
If you install the chromedriver-helper
gem, but don't have it in you Gemfile, your selenium tests might fail with:
Selenium::WebDriver::Error::WebDriverError: unable to connect to chromedriver 127.0.0.1:9515
The reason is that chromedriver-helper
ov...
Edge Rider: Power tools for ActiveRecord scopes
In our continued quest to extract proven code snippets from makandropedia into tested and upgradable gems, we have released Edge Rider.
Edge Rider was created with two intents:
- Provides a number of utility methods to facilitate hardcore work with scopes.
- Provide a stable API for working with scopes across multiple versions of Rails, since Rails has a tradition of breaking details of its scope API every other release.
The gem bundles multiple patches and initializers we've been using for hard...
Installation of therubyracer fails with "undefined method `include_path'"
Today I ran into trouble installing therubyracer on Ruby 1.8. The installation failed with
*** extconf.rb failed ***
Could not create Makefile due to some reason, probably lack of
necessary libraries and/or headers. Check the mkmf.log file for more
details. You may need configuration options.
Provided configuration options:
--with-opt-dir
--without-opt-dir
--with-opt-include
--without-opt-include=${opt-dir}/include
--with-opt-lib
--without-opt-lib=${opt-dir}/lib
--with-make-prog
...