New in Pivotal Tracker: Reply to emails, delete comments, browse public projects!

Friday, March 4, 2011

Team collaboration with Pivotal Tracker just got better – you can now post comments to stories right from your inbox by replying to any story notification email. That’s not all that’s new in this update – we’ve also added the ability to delete unwanted story comments, you can add extra notes like company address or tax ID to your billing receipts, and there’s a new public projects directory.

Continue reading for details.

Reply to story emails

Reply to any story notification email, and your response will appear as a new comment on that story within seconds. In order for Tracker to know who the reply is from, though, you’ll need to make sure that you’re replying from the email address that’s on your Tracker profile, and that you’re a member of the project.

Note: All Tracker emails now come from the pivotaltracker.com domain. Please add notifications@pivotaltracker.com and tracker-noreply@pivotaltracker.com as contacts or allowed senders in order to prevent Tracker emails from getting caught in your spam filter.

Delete comments

Story comments can now be deleted, by project owners or comment authors. To delete an unwanted comment, hover over the comment header (author’s name and time stamp), and click the trash can icon.

Public Projects directory

Public projects, which are visible to anyone, can now be easily explored with a new public projects directory.

This directory shows a featured public project at the top, a list of the most active projects, and a live feed of all public project activity. It also allows you to search for public projects by name, project description, or project member name.

More on public projects in this blog post.

Billing receipt notes

We’ve heard from many companies, especially in Europe, that their accounting rules require additional information to appear on billing receipts. You can now add arbitrary notes to your account, such as a company address or tax ID, which will appear on all printable receipts, including receipts for past transactions.

To add such information to your receipts, go to the Plans and Billing page of your account, and edit the Notes on Receipt field in the Billing Information section (which appears after you’ve upgraded to a paid plan).

Click on any of the ‘view receipt’ links in your Payment History, and you should see these notes on the printable receipt.

Let us know what you think in comments here or by email to tracker@pivotallabs.com.

Testing OmniAuth based login via Cucumber

Mike Gehard

Thursday, March 3, 2011

If you haven’t looked at OmniAuth for authentication with sites like Google, Github and Facebook, then you should take a look. It is pretty killer.

This morning we needed to write a Cucumber scenario to test that a user could log into the system using Google Apps.

We did a quick spike on getting OminAuth integrated, which was a super simple process, and poked around in the browser to make sure it was working OK.

Thanks to Jose Valim for providing some guidance, via the Devise test suite, on how to get this all up and running.

The basics can be found in this Gist:

I put that code in /features/support/omniauth.rb and then all I need to do is label any scenarios that need to deal with login with an @omniauth_test tag and we are all set.

As our features count grows, I could see us doing this before/after all Cucumber scenarios.

Note: You need to be using 0.2.0.beta5 of OmniAuth to get this to work. Earlier versions don’t have the testing functionality built in.

Also Note: This same functionality can be used in good, old RSpec integration tests or Steak tests as well.

Standup 03.03.2011: Sharing is Caring & English Lorem Ipsum Generator

Will Read

Thursday, March 3, 2011

Ask for Help

“Is there a way to have multiple ssh.config files or include other ssh type configurations in your main ssh.config?”

Still searching for an answer here.

“What’s the best way to share cap recipes across multiple internal git repos?”

Git submodules will work, but also think about using a shared gem. The shared gem approach will enable you to keep your server configuration in one place as opposed to scattered across multiple repos that define their own server list.

Interesting Things

Newer versions of RubyGems (v1.6 was explicitly mentioned) and Rails 2.3 are not compatible right out of the box. You can drop a block in to your environment.rb file to get around it
Love your Lorum Ipsum generator, but you need English words? Take a look at Fillerati wich will let you create some paragraphs from books in the public domain.

Using Cucumber/Capybara with SauceLabs SauceOnDemand

Mike Gehard

Wednesday, March 2, 2011

SauceLabs is a cloud based way to test your site against different browsers.

Up until now, they only supported the older Selenium RC based tests.

For those of us using Capybara, we were out of luck because Capybara uses Webdriver.

Well that just changed, they now support Webdriver. Check out the instructions on how to get is set up here.

The one thing that I disagree with in that post is setting the default Capybara driver to :sauce (Capybara.default_driver = :sauce). This seems a little heavy handed to me since I may not want to run all of my scenarios through the Sauce driver.

Upon further review of the source code, it looks like after installing the sauce gem, they redirect any scenarios tagged with @selenium to the Sauce driver. I like this better so if you don’t want to switch over all of your scenarios over to Sauce, you can just ignore the line mentioned above and simply tag the scenarios you want to run on Sauce with @selenium.

I haven’t had a lot of time to play with this but at least it is a start in getting Capybara based Cucumber scenarios to run against Sauce Labs.

My next step is to figure out how to run one Cucumber scenario to run against multiple browsers on Sauce.

Another thing I’d like to figure out how to do is only run Selenium based tests on demand so they don’t run on Sauce every time I run my Cucumber suite. That could run up a decent Sauce bill, especially if you had multiple developers running Cucumber scenarios multiple times a day.

Upgrading to Rails 3.0.5 inflections

Pivotal Labs

Wednesday, March 2, 2011

We’re working on an upgrade form 3.0.4 and we got a database error when we tried to generate fixtures or seed the db:

PGError: ERROR:  relation "data" does not exist
LINE 4:              WHERE a.attrelid = '"metadata"'::regclass

We first ran into this with a has_one :metadata association but you’d have the same problem without any associations to the Metadata class. Investigation lead to this discovery:

rails-3.0.4 > Metadata.table_name
=> "metadatas"
rails-3.0.5 > Metadata.table_name
=> "metadata"

The rails team added some inflections to ActiveSupport::Inflector and fixed a scaffold generator.

This fixed double-pluralization of irregular plurals for ticket 6363.

Example:

rails-3.0.4 > ActiveSupport::Inflector.pluralize "metadata"
=> "metadatas"
rails-3.0.5 > ActiveSupport::Inflector.pluralize "metadata"
=> "metadata"

Here are example of the four changed nouns:

data: “datas” is now “data”
viri : “viris” is now “viri”
oxen: “oxens” is now “oxen”
mice: “mices” is now “mice”

Anyway, quick fix:

class Metadata < ActiveRecord::Base
  set_table_name "metadatas"
end

Of course, we could rename our metadata class and table…

Thanks to this guy for pointing this out!

New Tech Talk: JRuby on AppEngine

Sean Beckett

Wednesday, March 2, 2011

John Woodell, a JRuby developer from Google, describes the state of JRuby on Google’s AppEngine.

App Engine version 1.4.0. is here! It’s our most significant release of the year for the App Engine SDK, including a number of very big features that we know developers have been eagerly awaiting. App Engine’s infrastructure can now anticipate the need for more resources and warm up new application instances (in the background) before routing user traffic to them.

See all our talks at http://pivotallabs.com/talks

Artful Personalization

Tuesday, March 1, 2011 | Run time: 32:59

Rapleaf is an aggregation service for personalization data. Manish Shah describes how they help companies gain insight into customers, engage them more meaningfully, and deliver timely messages. They also help consumers understand their online footprint.

New Tech Talk: Model Driven Infrastructure with Puppet

Sean Beckett

Tuesday, March 1, 2011

Luke Kanies, Founder and CEO of Puppet Labs and Puppet’s original author, talks about how Puppet relies on modeling and why. He discusses the trade-offs that come with a modeled approach, delving into what models exist, how they interact, and how that benefits the developer, integrator, and, most importantly, the sysadmin. Puppet’s declarative language is a key part of its model so special attention is given to why they’ve built a declarative specification language, including plans for the future and why no one will be replacing it with pure Ruby any time soon. Luke also discusses Puppet’s resource types, the directed acyclic graph at the heart of the transactional system, and how Puppet can make guarantees about simulation mode, auditing, and logging.

See all our talks at http://pivotallabs.com/talks

Standup 2011-03-01: Spork! Spork! Spork!

Pivotal Labs

Tuesday, March 1, 2011

Ask for Help

“Has anyone else had their Selenium tests break after upgrading from rails 2.3.8 to 2.3.11?”

One team was using Rack 1.1.0, Mongrel 1.1.5 and Rails 2.3.8. When they upgraded to Rails 2.3.11, their Selenium tests started failing. After some investigation they found this commit which they used to create a monkeypatch for Rack 1.1.0:

# Back-porting this patch: https://github.com/rack/rack/commit/f6f3c60938ea3b08f3292a2480e6753c293584e5
module Rack
  module Utils
    class HeaderHash < Hash
      def [](k)
        super(@names[k]) if @names[k]
        super(@names[k.downcase])
      end
    end
  end
end

Anyone have a better solution?

“Slower test suite with Spork?”

Spork can speed up the start-up time of your test suite, but has anyone seen it slow down the overall test run? One Pivot was seeing a 10% slowdown in overall suite speed.

Interesting Things

Postgres can write a lot of stuff to your logs. You can quiet it down with the silent-postgres gem and by adding min_messages to database.yml
RubyMine 3.1 has support for Spork!