The Ruby and Rails community linklog
Made a library? Written a blog post? Found a useful tutorial? Share it with the Ruby community here or just enjoy what everyone else has found!
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Video Tutorial: Setup a Rails 4.1 Development Environment on Ubuntu
Learn how to setup a Ruby on Rails 4.1 development environment on Ubuntu 14.04 in this video tutorial.
Cape Town, South Africa: Rails Workshops
Register now for a workshop on Rails Advanced Techniques or a Rails introductory class, scheduled for January in Cape Town, South Africa.
What Do You Lose By Not Using Chef (When You Deploy Your Ruby Server)?
Here’s a quick overview of what Chef does for you when you use it from the very beginning. It’s easy to think of Chef as “automation that I’ll get to when it will save me enough time.” Here are several reasons you might not want to do that.
Rails 5 development
Rails 5 development has started! [more inside]
sportdb Update (football.db,worldcup.db,etc.) Incl. Quick Starter Datafiles; Zip Downloads n More
I’ve uploaded a new sportdb gem update, that is, v1.9.14. What’s news? The sportdb gem that lets you load datasets (e.g. teams, leagues, matches, etc.) in plain text into your SQL database of choice now includes a new build system. Use the new Datafile - a mini language a.k.a. domain-specific language (DSL) that lets you setup your database in minutes. For example, to setup a football.db for all World Cups 1930-2014 use the worldcup.rb quick starter template. Type $ sportdb new worldcup to download the datasets (as zip archives), setup all tables, indexes, etc. and read in all fixtures. Cheers.
RubyConf 2014 - The human bits
Humanity and community was omnipresent at RubyConf 2014. Guess what? I wrote a blog post about it!
Tips to avoid RMagick memory leaks
I share some tips, I used to fight memory leaks when manipulating images with RMagick.
Challenges faced in a little larger Rails API project
I just wrote a post about the challenges when developing a little larger API-only Rails project. I think Rails is good but needs some improvements in some areas. Check it out and let me know if you agree/disagree :)
Tutorial: Sending Emails from Rails Apps
Our new tutorial on how to send emails in a Rails app. We covered topics of ActionMailer, ActionMailer Preview, Sending emails with a third party service (Gmail and Mailgun) and finally, using Active Job to send emails in the background. [more inside]
Medium wysiwyg clone
I just launched Dante wysiwyg. It’s just another medium.com editor clone. it has many of the medium wysiwyg features, and is in our roadmap to get 100% of the features that medium editor has. It comes with asset-pipeline (rails/sprockets) integration out of the box.
Rails middlware to remove google ads while developing.
I finally snapped and no longer wanted to see Google ads while developing my Rails app. This was my solution.
local_webserver released
I just released a spin-off of middleman-presentation. It’s a webserver which serves a local directory only without any configuration. You can find it here. Beware it’s written in Go.
3 Tricks to debug Opal code from your browser
Most of the time you’ll spend debugging applications written with Opal you’ll be fine using just these three tricks.
Using guard gem in a project with multiple modules
Ania Ślimak came up with the idea of how to deal with a large number of guards in multiple modules using “chdir” option of “guard” gem. Read about it on the Lunar Logic blog.
Minispec - a new testing library that tends to be as simple and intuitive as Ruby are
Minispec uses native Ruby methods for testing:
is(a) == b
does(a).include?(b)
is(a).empty?
More examples
Fixing Fixtures
For a long time, using Rails fixtures was considered bad form, but in recent years, a lot of developers have come back around to using them. This post provides tips and practices for simplifying your fixtures and making them easier to manage.
Introduction to Conditional HTTP Caching with Rails
Often times we don’t want an HTTP client to blindly cache content that it has been given. We may not be able to rely on setting specific expiration headers either. Instead we need a way for the client to ask the server whether or not a resource has been updated. [more inside]
New from RailsApps: Stripe Checkout Example and Tutorial
Ready for a holiday side project? If you’ve got Rails 4.2, you can use Rails Composer to build a Stripe Checkout starter application that combines payment processing with Devise. Here’s the Stripe Checkout Example application. There’s also a tutorial.
Service objects in Rails - complete example
How to create a service object? How to split big services? How to handle dependency injection? Find out
String Interpolation: The Bad Parts
String interpolation in Ruby is great. It’s one of those niceties that I really miss whenever I venture into JavaScript land. But watch out! There are some lesser known “features” of Ruby’s string interpolation that can burn you… badly. Learn how.
How I sped up our Rails Test Suite by 267%
This article writes about speeding up a rails rest suite significantly by avoiding common pitfalls. This part of the series talks about cucumber improvements and using poltergeist. [more inside]
Each... or else
I love each, but I have a problem with it. How do you handle an empty collection?
Introducing Phusion Passenger 5 beta 1 (codename "Raptor")
Version 5.0.0 beta 1 of the popular Phusion Passenger app server has been released. This release is codenamed “Raptor”, is much faster, helps you better identify and solve problems, and has a ton of other improvements.
Log tagging in Rails
Whilst deploying a large application to Heroku, we needed a way to trace application requests from the second they come into the router through to when the request completes. Enter log tagging.