Cucumber_rails' old-school web-steps have been deprecated for a while, urging developers to write high-level step definitions that directly use Capybara or Webrat.

We think that's a bit drastic. More high-level steps are good, but ticking the odd check box with a general step is not always bad.

So we took the old web steps, improved them a bit, added some other favorites of ours (steps for emails, tables, [time travelling](/ma...

If you once had HTTP Strict Transport Security enabled for a domain, and you want to disable it again, you need to send this header over a secure connection:

Strict-Transport-Security: max-age=0;

The next time a browser visits your site, it will forget that it was once flagged as HTTPS-only.

Should you need to remove the HSTS flag from your local browser (e.g. for debugging), you can do so in Chrome by accessing [chrome://net-internals/#hsts](chrome://net-internals/#hs...

Edge Rider gives your relations a method #origin_class that returns the class the relation is based on.
This is useful e.g. to perform unscoped record look-up.

Post.recent.origin_class
# => Post

Note that #origin_class it roughly equivalent to the blockless form of #unscoped from Rails 3.2+, but it works consistently across all Rails versions. #unscoped does not exist for Rails 2 and is broken in Rails 3.0.

React.js is a relatively new Javascript templating engine that has two-way-bindings like AngularJS or Batman. The interesting idea here is that React keeps a virtual copy of the DOM tree in memory, and when you re-render, it only changes the DOM as little as required. That means if you re-render a list with 1000 items, and only one item has changed, the browser-DOM will only remove and add a single element instead of 1000 elements. This makes React.js views insanely fast.

The attached article proposes that React.js is so fast that you don...

Spring is a Rails application preloader. When debugging e.g. the rails gem, you'll be wondering why your raise, puts or debugger debugging statements have no effect. That's because Spring preloads and caches your application once and all consecutive calls to it will not see any changes in your debugged gem.

Howto

Disable spring with export DISABLE_SPRING=1 in your terminal. That will keep Spring at bay in that terminal session.

In Ruby, [you can only write environment variables that subproc...

MenuetOS is an Operating System in development for the PC written entirely in 32/64 bit assembly language. Menuet64 is released under License and Menuet32 under GPL. Menuet supports 32/64 bit x86 assembly programming for smaller, faster and less resource hungry applications.

• Fits on a single floppy, boots also from CD and USB drives
• Responsive GUI with resolutions up to 1920x1080, 16 million colours
• Free-form, transparent and skinnable application windows, drag'n drop
• SMP multiprocessor support with currently up to 8 cpus
• IDE: E...

General

Programatically invoke Rails generators

Require the generator, instantiate it and invoke it (because generators are Thor::Groups, you need to invoke them with invoke_all). Example:

 require 'generators/wheelie/haml/haml_generator'
 Generators::HamlGenerator.new('argument').invoke_all

Other ways: Rails invokes its generators with Rails::Generators.invoke ARGV.shift, ARGV. From inside a Rails generator, you may call the [inherited Thor method invoke(args=[], options={}, config={})](https://github...

docopt helps you define interface for your command-line app, and automatically generate parser for it.

docopt is based on conventions that are used for decades in help messages and man pages for program interface description. Interface description in docopt is such a help message, but formalized. Here is an example:

Naval Fate.

Usage:
  naval_fate ship new <name>...
  naval_fate ship <name> move <x> <y> [--speed=<kn>]
  naval_fate ship shoot <x> <y>
  naval_fate mine (set|remove) <x> <y> [--moored|--drifting]
  naval_fate -h |...

This note summarizes the ruby exception hierarchy.

Exception
  NoMemoryError
  ScriptError
    LoadError
    NotImplementedError
    SyntaxError
  SignalException
    Interrupt
      Timeout::Error    # < ruby 1.9.2
  StandardError         # caught by rescue (default if no type was specified)
    ArgumentError
    IOError
      EOFError
    IndexError
    LocalJumpError
    NameError
      NoMethodError
    Ran...

When you want the table headers to always stay around (e.g. because that table is huuuge), use the code below.

Style

table.fixed_table_header{
  position: fixed;
  top: 0;
  width: auto;
  display: none;
  border: none;
  margin: 0;
}

Javascript

;(function($) {
   $.fn.fixHeader = function() {
      return this.each(function() {
         var $table = $(this),
            $t_fixed;

         function init() {
            $t_fixed = $table.clone();
            $t_fixed.find('tbody').remove().end().addClass('fi...

If you want to label things with a color but don't actually care which cholor, you can use the attached Colorizer class.

To get a completely random color (some of which will clash with your design):

Colorizer.colorize(some_object) # => "#bb4faa"

To get similiar colors (e. g. bright, pale colors of different hues):

 # random hue, saturation of 0.5, lightness of 0.6
Colorizer.colorize_similarly(some_object, 0.5, 0.6) # => "#bbaaaa"

Also see the color gem.

So you have a restangular collection and you want to remove an element from it, after you've successfully deleted it from the server.

The README suggests to say something like $scope.users = _.without($scope.users, user). While that works at first glance (the element is no longer in your collection), it will break horribly when you want to use restangular's attributes on that collection.

This...

If you regularly get ActionView::MissingTemplate exceptions, maybe some bot visits your site requesting silly formats like:

http://www.rails-app.com/makandra.html-username-2000 # => Rails tries to retrieve 'makandra' with format 'html-username-2000'

Just restrict accepted format parameters for the whole application like this:

class ApplicationController < ActionController::Base

  before_filter :refuse_silly_formats

  private

  def refuse_silly_formats
    acceptable_formats = %w[html xml pdf]

    if par...

List of variables used in Bootstrap. Overwrite to customize your bootstrap application.

When you are using bootstrap-sass, simply replace @ by $.

If you are using Angular and want something like Rails' simple_format which HTML-formats a plain-text input into paragraphs and line breaks, this directive is for you.

Any HTML fragments inside that text will still be escaped properly.

Use it like this, where your text attribute specifies something available in your current scope:

<simple-format text="email.message"></simple-format>

This is the directive, in CoffeeScript syntax:

@app.directive 'simpleFor...

Now you can say:

class Song < ActiveRecord::Base

  attr_accessor :virtual_attribute
  
  assignable_values_for :virtual_attribute do
    %w[air fluff]
  end

end

Sometimes you may want to print files from the command line, especially when you have lots of them.
You can use lp for that.

To print a single example.pdf file on your default printer, simply say:

lp example.pdf

lp accepts multiple filenames, so to print all PDF files in the current directory:

lp *.pdf

You can specify a printer via the -d switch:

lp -d YOUR_PRINTER_NAME *.pdf

Your printer's name is then one you defined on your system. You can check with your CUPS configuration by visiting `http://localhost:631/...

If you want to do JavaScript-style camelization, ActiveSupport's String#camelize method can actually help you out. Simply pass a :lower argument to it.

>> 'foo_bar_baz'.camelize
=> "FooBarBaz"
>> 'foo_bar_baz'.camelize(:lower)
=> "fooBarBaz"

Run:

rake -W [substring_of_task]

If you come across an (older) application that is using Prototype instead of jQuery, you may often see events bound to single elements only, like this:

$('foo').observe('change', updateThings);
$('bar').observe('change', updateThings);
$('baz').observe('change', updateThings);

If you are calling only one method in each case, this is unnecessarily ugly. Also, when your page contents have been replaced via AJAX (like sections of a form after choosing something), those event hooks will no longer wo...

Use the following command to test if a server (in this example: makandra.com on port 443) uses Perfect Forward Secrecy (PFS):

openssl s_client -connect makandra.com:443 -cipher ECDHE-RSA-RC4-SHA

You should see something like the following:

~ > openssl s_client -connect projecthero.com:443 -cipher ECDHE-RSA-RC4-SHA
CONNECTED(00000003)
depth=1 O = AlphaSSL, CN = AlphaSSL CA - G2
verify error:num=20:unable to get local issuer certificate
verify return:0
---
Certificate chain
 0 s:/C=DE/OU=Domain Control Va...

Enter the hostname of a server to test it for CVE-2014-0160.

The Heartbleed Bug is a serious vulnerability in the popular OpenSSL cryptographic software library. This weakness allows stealing the information protected, under normal conditions, by the SSL/TLS encryption used to secure the Internet.