Check for a disabled link with Capybara + Rspec.

Styling a callout count box in CSS

Eg. Fork count in Github

Check if a dom element has children

$('#foo).children().length > 0

Added message to Campfire chatroom for Capistrano deploys

# Gemfile
gem 'capistrano-campfire'
gem 'tinder'

# config/deploy.rb
require 'capistrano/campfire'
require 'tinder'

namespace :campfire do
  desc "Send a message to the campfire chat room"
  task :snitch do
    campfire = Tinder::Campfire.new YOUR_CAMPFIRE_ACCOUNT, :ssl => true, :token => YOUR_CAMPFIRE_TOKEN
    room = campfire.find_room_by_name YOURC_CAMPFIRE_CHATROOM
    snitch_message = fetch(:snitch_message) { ENV['MESSAGE'] || abort('Capfire snitch message is missing. Use set :snitch_message, "Your message"') }
    room.speak(snitch_message)
  end

  desc "Send a message to the campfire chat room about the deploy start"
  task :snitch_begin do
    set :snitch_message, "BEGIN DEPLOY [#{stage.upcase}]: #{ENV['USER']}, #{branch}/#{real_revision[0, 7]} to #{deploy_to}"
    snitch
  end

  desc "Send a message to the campfire chat room about the deploy end"
  task :snitch_end do
    set :snitch_message, "END DEPLOY [#{stage.upcase}]: #{ENV['USER']}, #{branch}/#{real_revision[0, 7]} to #{deploy_to}"
    snitch
  end

  desc "Send a message to the campfire chat roob about the rollback"
  task :snitch_rollback do
    set :snitch_message, "ROLLBACK [#{stage.upcase}]: #{ENV['USER']}, #{latest_revision[0, 7]} to #{previous_revision[0, 7]} on #{deploy_to}"
    snitch
  end
end

before :deploy do
  campfire.snitch_begin unless ENV['QUIET'].to_i > 0
end

after :deploy do
  campfire.snitch_end unless ENV['QUIET'].to_i > 0
end

Permission denied (publickey) error when trying to do cap deploy

My solution was to run in my terminal

ssh-add

Seemed like my there wasn't an identity associated with my ssh public key so Github rejected capistrano attempt to git clone from the deployment server.

Top 3 hosted CI (continuous integration) for Rails apps

Here's my summary of top 3 hosted solutions for Rails continuous integration are:

- https://semaphoreapp.com/features
- https://www.circleci.com/
- Tddium

Tddium looks very configurable and gives power to the commandline, eg. run builds from local console on branches. $15/mth for 10 worker hours.

http://docs.tddium.com/

CircleCI had good reviews and sounded like it runs builds really fast. Like Tddium, it's configurable via a yaml file. No official price plans on website but responded via twitter that theirs plans starts from $19.

http://blog.exceptional.io/news/circleci/

Semaphore selling point's their "simple stupid" approach to CI. Oauth via Github, add collaborators and boom. Runs are every git push and at a price of $14/mth, it seemed the cheapest of 'em lot.

https://semaphoreapp.com/features

My vote is for Semaphore since it's the cheapest and simplest to use for a small project.

Update all associations of a Rails model

  @msg_thread.messages.update_all(status: 'read')

Ember.js gotcha - require handlebar.js

Require handlebar.js BEFORE ember.js

# in rails
//= require handlebars
//= require ember

Scope javascript variable in coffeescript so it's available in browser

App = Foo.bar

window.App = App

Rails scaffold only the controller resource

rails g scaffold_controller users

Customizing devise views & controllers

I find myself repeating and googling this far too many times...

# Generate the devise views
rails g devise:views

# Add customize views resource to route
devise_for :users, controllers: { registrations: "users/registrations" }

# Move views to new resource folder
git mv app/views/devise/registrations/ app/views/users/

# Add new custom devise controller
class Users::RegistrationsController < Devise::SessionsController

  def new
    @user = User.new
  end

  def create
    ...
  end

end

Cannot customize default devise views

DO NOT use Devise to generate scoped views.

rails generate devise:views users

Just use

rails generate devise:views

Easy way to stage deleted files with git rm

git rm -u

Add index on PostgreSQL table column for in-built full text search in Rails

Applicable for PG 8.4 and above.

class AddIndexesToListings < ActiveRecord::Migration
  def change
    execute <<-SQL
      create index on listings using gin(to_tsvector('english', title));
      create index on listings using gin(to_tsvector('english', description));
    SQL
  end
end

Upgrade Heroku db to new PostgreSQL Dev addon

heroku addons:add heroku-postgresql:dev
heroku pg:promote NEW_DB_COLORFUL_NAME

Restarting crashed workers in Heroku

Presumably we can issue the restart command

heroku restart worker.1

But don't bother. It didn't work for me. Just kill it and spin up another worker.

heroku ps:scale worker=0
heroku ps:scale worker=1

Configure PostgreSQL full-text search using pg_search gem for partial word match

class Listing < ActiveRecord::Base
  include PgSearch
  pg_search_scope :search_by_title_and_description, against: [:title, :description], using: { tsearch: { prefix: true } }
end

Run delayed jobs on Heroku with queue names

heroku config:set QUEUE=xxx
heroku ps:scale worker=1

Transfer domain from a Heroku Zerigo account to another

Say you have a domain foo.com that's tied to a Heroku Zerigo addon, you can import them and all its CNAME entries into another account very easily.

Steps:

1. In old Zerigo account, click on domain  >> "Tools" >> "Reassign domain"
2. Click "Generate a reassignment token" button and copy the token string
3. In new Zerigo account, click on "+ add / import" >> "Add reassigned domain"
4. Enter the transferring domain name and the copied reassignment token
5. Click "Add" and voila!

Share methods between controller and views in Rails

The key is to put methods into ApplicationHelper and call them in the controller

module ApplicationHelper
  def user_unauthorized?
    ...
  end
end

class HomeController < ApplicationController
  def index
    redirect_to '/foo' if view_context.user_unauthorized?
  end
end

Passing array of elements as multiple arguments in a ruby method

Suppose we wanna pass an array of elements like this

keys = %w{
  user_id
  shop_id
  url
  title
  shop_name
}

Then we need to prepend the variable with * as arguments

Shop.slice(*keys)

Multiple heroku apps on different subdomains managed by Zerigo

Suppose you have 3 different heroku apps but you want them to have their own domains as well as subdomains.

a.herokuapps.com -> a.foo.com or a.com
b.herokuapps.com -> b.foo.com or b.com
c.herokuapps.com -> c.foo.com or c.com

If you wanna use the Zerigo DNS addone, the trick is to use addon in ONLY ONE of the heroku apps. In this instance, I'll add the Zerigo addon into a.herokuapps.com. From the addon dropdown, you should be able to click on the configure button and that'll bring you to the Zerigo admin page. Suppose you've already point the foo.com, a.com, b.com and c.com nameservers to Zerigo nameservers, you should add the subdomains as CNAME entries.

a.foo.com CNAME as a.herokuapps.com
b.foo.com CNAME as b.herokuapps.com
c.foo.com CNAME as c.herokuapps.com

And add all the domains and subdomains as custom domains in each heroku app and should be good to go once the DNS gets propagated.

Speed up updates of large datasets/records in Rails

Suppose we have 10,0000 users. We can do the following

User.find_each |user|
  user.update_attributes(status: 'active')
end

But that takes a long to complete. Executing raw sql over ActiveRecord speeds things up tremendously.

User.connection.execute("update users set status = 'active'")

Get ruby constant from string

UserType.const_get('foo'.upcase)

Rails generator to generate rspec files by default instead of test unit

Just add rspec-rails into the Gemfile. Nothing else needed.

group :development, :test do
  gem 'rspec-rails'
end

Sync database from production db on Heroku

One could use the awesome taps gem like so:

heroku db:pull

However that gets real slow real quick so I had to use PG Backups addon instead

# Install heroku addon
heroku addons:add pgbackups

# Capture latest db snapshot on heroku
heroku pgbackups:capture

# Get download url and enter it in browser with a heroku login session
heroku pgbackups:url {latest_backup_name}

# Restore pg dump into local PostgreSQL database
pg_restore -d {db_name} ~/Downloads/{latest_backup_name}.dump

Starting PostgreSQL server on OSX

pg_ctl -D /usr/local/var/postgres start

Force remove files in OSX Trash

rm ~/.Trash/xxx

Rails number_to_percentage always 0

This is a silly mistake that I often make.

# This always return a big fat zero
number_to_percentage(User.count/Signup.count)

# Remember to have divide by floats!
number_to_percentage(User.count.to_f/Signup.count.to_f)

Check if string is a JSON in Rails

# config/initializers/string_methods.rb

require 'json'

class String
  def is_json?
    begin
      !!JSON.parse(self)
    rescue
      false
    end
  end
end

Switch database from MySQL (ClearDB addon) back to PostgresSQL in Heroku

Had permission problems using ClearDB and figure it wasn't worth all the hassle of adding another layer of abstraction/configuration when Heroku already works with PostgreSQL out of the box. Here's how to switch back to PG.

# Remove addon
heroku addons:remove cleardb

# Set DATABASE_URL back to PG
heroku config | grep SHARED_DATABASE_URL # => postgres://XXX
heroku config:add DATABASE_URL='postgres://XXX'

ClearDB MySQL on Heroku gotcha

Didn't know that a rails project deployed on heroku was using ClearDB MySQL as production database - I just assumed that it's PostgreSQL on Heroku till I saw that ClearDB addon was used. Removing the addon and mysql gems and configuring config/database.yml did not saw the application switched back to PG. Read the ClearDB addon and realized that DATABASE_URL environment was set.

https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/cleardb

Quickly checkout Git remote branch into a local branch

git checkout -b LOCAL_BRANCH origin/REMOTE_BRANCH

Codeblocks for Markdown

From Daring Fireball:

To produce a code block in Markdown, simply indent every line of the block by at least 4 spaces

At least 4 spaces... so that means 2 tabs if your tab is set to 2 spaces.

SQL dump for MySQL databases

backup:

mysqldump -u root DATABASE_NAME > sqldump.sql

restore:

mysql -u root DATABASE_NAME < sqldump.sql

Search and replace words in multiple files in Vim

Upgraded my project's factory girl and got some nasty warnings about Factory(:xxx) and Factory.create(:xxx) syntax being deprecated. I've been using the former for almost all of the specs so needed an easy way to search and replace words in multiple files in Vim.

:args app/models/*
:argdo %s/Factory(:/FactoryGirl.create(:/ge | update

Differences in Ruby's loading methods

load() - loads and reloads indiscriminately

autoload() - only loads when classes inside are first called upon

require() - loads only once, further calls are ignored

require_relative() - same as require() except file paths are explicitly relative

Inverted to negative screen on OSX

Great for presentation when ambient lights are too bright and words can't be seen.

CTRL+OPT+CMD+8


etc hosts on OSX


sudo vi /private/etc/hosts
or
sudo vi /etc/hosts


Rspec validate_presence_of matcher with scope

it { should validate_uniqueness_of(:foo).scoped_to(:bar) }

Ruby case switch gotcha

Doh. Ruby's case switch implicitly checks Object#class.

http://www.postal-code.com/mrhappy/blog/2007/02/01/ruby-comparing-an-objects-class-in-a-case-statement/

Show whitespace characters in Vim

This toggles showing the whitespaces

:set list!