Ruby has the class Proc which encapsulates a "block of code". There are 2 "flavors" of Procs:

• Those with "block semantics", called blocks or confusingly sometimes also procs
• Those with "method semantics", called lambdas

lambdas

They behave like Ruby method definitions:

• They are strict about their arguments.
• return means "exit the lambda"

How to define a lambda

1. With the lambda keyword

   test = lambda do |arg|
     puts arg
   end
   

2. With the lambda literal -> (since Ruby 1.9.1)
   ...

When two classes implement the same behavior (methods, callbacks, etc.), you should extract that behavior into a trait or module. This card describes how to test that extracted behavior without repeating yourself.

Note that the examples below use Modularity traits to extract shared behavior. This is simply because we like to do it that way at makandra. The same techniques apply for modules and overriding self.included.

Example
---...

tl;dr

When a cookie includes an Expires attribute or an HTTP response includes caching headers like Expires or Cache-Control, their validity depends on the server's Date header if present. Otherwise, the browser uses its local time. This can lead to issues in tests with mocked time or inconsistent cache behavior.

Cookie Expires depends on the Date header or browser time

When a cookie includes an Expires attribute, the browser evaluates the expiration date relative to a reference time:

1. If the HTTP response ...

Sometimes you have a test expectation but actually want a better error message in case of a failure. Here is how to do that.

Background

Consider this test:

expect(User.last).to be_present

In case of an error, it will fail with a not-so-helpful error message:

expected present? to return true, got false (Spec::Expectations::ExpectationNotMetError)

Solution

That can be fixed easily. RSpec expectations allow you to pass an error message like this:

expect(User.last).to be_present, 'Could not find a user!'

...

tl;dr

Prefer request specs over end-to-end tests (Capybara) to joyfully test file downloads!

Why?

Testing file downloads via Capybara is not easy and results in slow and fragile tests. We tried different approaches and the best one is just okay.

Tests for file downloads via Capybara ...

• ... are slow,
• ... are fragile (breaks CI, breaks if Selenium driver changes, ...),
• ... need workarounds for your specia...

RSpec >= 3.3 added aggregate_failures, which allows multiple failures in an example and list them all, rather than aborting on the first failure.

This can be used:

• In the global configuration
• With the tag :aggregate_failures (our preferred option in case every expectations should be aggregated)
• With the method aggregate_failures

[Here](https://web.archive.org/web/20210110131654/https://relishapp.com/rspec...

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...

"Open-source software (OSS) is great. Anyone can use virtually any open-source code in their projects."

Well, it depends. Licenses can make things difficult, especially when you are developing closed-source software. Since some OSS licenses even require the employing application to be open-sourced as well (looking at you, GPL), you cannot use such software in a closed-source project.

To be sure on this, we have developed a project-level integration of Pivotal's excellent [license_finder](https:/...

Maintaining larger projects makes it more difficult to balance refactoring and upgrade tasks according to its actual value. Consider to create and periodically maintain a summary, which helps you and your team in the decision which refactoring task should be taken next.

Template

Here is an template on how you might categorize your tasks:

| Technical debt | Estimated Efforts | Visible customer value| Customer value explained| Developer value|Developer value explained|
|-----------------------------|----------------|----------...

For Sidekiq to be able to retry your jobs it has to be able to catch errors that occur while a job is executed.

Per default, Sidekiq will not raise / notify you if the retry count is exhausted. It will only copy the job to the dead queue (see wiki).

If you want to get notified, you have to implement it in your worker explicitly with a sidekiq_retries_exhausted-block, e.g. like this:

class DownloadWorker
  include Sidekiq::Worker

  # Import jobs are retried a few time...

Localizing a non-trivial application can be a huge undertaking. This card will give you an overview over the many components that are affected.

When you are asked to give an estimate for the effort involved, go through the list below and check which points are covered by your requirements. Work with a developer who has done a full-app localization before and assign an hour estimate to each of these points.

Static text

• Static strings and template text in app must be translated: Screens, mailer templates, PDF templates, helpe...

Let's say you have a gem which has the following module:

module SuperClient

  def self.foo
    'Foo'
  end
  
  def bar
    'Bar'
  end

end

For reasons you need to override foo and bar.

Keep in mind: Your code quality is getting worse with with each prepend (other developers are not happy to find many library extensions). Try to avoid it if possible.

1. Add a lib/ext/super_client.rb to your project (see How to organize monkey patches in Ruby on Rails projects)
2. Add the extension, which ov...

Summary

• Use return to return from a method. return accepts a value that will be the return value of the method call.
• Use break to quit from a block and from the method that yielded to the block. break accepts a value that supplies the result of the expression it is “breaking” out of.
• Use next to skip the rest of the current iteration. next accepts an argument that will be the result of that block iteration.

The following method will serve as an example in the details below:

def example
  puts yield
  puts ...

Tests are about 100% control over UI interaction and your test scenario. Randomness makes writing tests hard. You will also push tests that are green for you today, but red for a colleague tomorrow.

That said, please don't do something like this:

Factory(:document) do |document|
  document.category { ['foo', 'bar', 'baz'].sample }
end

Instead do this:

Factory(:document) do |document|
  document.category 'foo'
end

The case against Faker

I even recommend to not use libraries like [Faker]...

Haml 6 was a major rewrite with performance in mind. To achieve a performance improvement of 1.7x, some design trade-offs had to be made. The most notable change might be the simplified attribute rendering.

In Haml 5, attribute rendering knew two special cases: an attribute with value true would be rendered without a value, an attribute with a falsy value would not be rendered at all. All other values would just be rendered as attribute values.

According to the Haml maintai...

This card shows how to upgrade a Rails 2 application from Rails 2.3.8 through every single patch level up to 2.3.18, and then, hopefully, Rails LTS.

2.3.8 to 2.3.9

This release has many minor changes and fixes to prepare your application for Rails 3.

Step-by-step upgrade instructions:

0. Upgrade rails gem
1. Change your environment.rb so it says RAILS_GEM_VERSION = '2.3.9'
2. Change your ...

The linked MDN article is quite informative of a neat feature supported by all major browsers: Unicode character class escape.

You can use it to write regular expressions that work on the full UTF-8 space, not just Latin/ASCII. For example, a password policy matcher might include regular expressions like [A-z] or [0-9], but those do not match e.g. German umlauts or [Eastern Arabic Numerals](https:/...

When Capybara locates elements in the DOM, by default it allows only accessing visible elements -- when you are using a driver that supports it (e.g. Selenium, not the default Rack::Test driver).

Consider the following HTML:

<div class="test1">One<div>
<div class="test2">Two</div>

With some CSS:

.test1 { display: block }
.test2 { display: none }

We will be using Capybara's find below, but this applies to any Capybara finder methods.

Default: visible: :visible

As described above, by default Capybara finds ...

It is good programming practice to Don't Repeat Yourself (or DRY). In Ruby on Rails we keep our code DRY by sharing behavior by using inheritance, modules, traits or partials.

When you reuse behavior you want to reuse tests as well. You are probably already reusing examples in unit tests. Unfortunately it is much harder to reuse code when writing integration tests with Cucumber, where you need to...

Slow test suites are a major pain point in projects, often due to RSpec and FactoryBot. Although minitest and fixtures are sometimes viewed as outdated, they can greatly improve test speed.

We adopted a project using minitest and fixtures, and while it required some initial refactoring and establishing good practices, the faster test suite was well worth it! Stick with me to explore how these tools might actually be a good practice.

So, why is this setup faster? Partially, it's because minitest is more lightweight than RSpec, which...

When testing JavaScript functionality in Selenium (E2E), you may need to access a class or function inside of a evaluate_script block in one of your steps. Capybara may only access definitions that are attached to the browser (over the window object that acts as the base). That means that once you are exporting your definition(s) in Webpacker, these won't be available in your tests (and neither in the dev console). The following principles/concepts also apply to Sprockets.

Say we have a StreetMap class:

// street_map.js
class S...