Ask for Help

“Paperclip and fixture builder – we’re getting some strange errors that for some reason are fixed when you rerun fixture builder – any ideas?”

No one has run into this specifically, but a few people said to make sure you’re mocking out Paperclip.

“Fakeweb, Webmock, VCR, artifice – what’s a good Ruby/Rails developer to use?”

It was mentioned that Artifice is good for Selenium tests while Fakeweb and Webmock are good for rSpec tests. VCR’s got some fans as well. Sounds like you can’t go all that wrong whatever you choose.

Interesting-y

• GoGaRuCo – This year it will be September 16th & 17th. A call for proposals will be going out sometime in the near future.

• Unicorn – it turns out that Unicorn doesn’t reopen logs after a log rotation unless the path to the log in Unicorn is absolute – so don’t use relative paths!

Interestings

Get your Rails mentoring on at RailsBridge this April 8th & 9th @ the Modcloth offices in downtown SF. It’s very rewarding.

If you have nested_attributes updating an attribute that is NOT in your attr_accessible attribute list on your ActiveRecord model you won’t get an exception – it will just silently fail. It will, however, output a warning line to your Rails log file. Fun for the whole family.

Using popen to open a process actually calls ‘sh -c’ to open your process, so the process you just ran is actually the child of the ‘sh -c’ process you just ran. This makes tracking down PIDs simply wonderful. :-) You can use ‘exec’ instead and your process will be the parent process. But if you’re using the new hotness you can instead use Process.spawn in Ruby 1.9.

Ask for Help

“Is there a better way to work on a feature, set that feature set aside, do a small change, check that small change in, then resume work on the feature, all using Git?”

git stash was originally used. There were also suggestions to use a feature branch or use one of the Git GUI tools (gitx, tower, smartgit, gitti) that let you partially stage your changes then check in. Or git-friendly workflow scripts or the ol’ reliable git cherry-pick.

Help

• Does anyone know how to set a caching header for urls that end with a cachebusting string (e.g. ?123456789)? Apparently you’re not allowed to get the query string when mucking with rewrite rules. A couple of people think that you are able to get your hands on it…somehow.
• How do you do a screen capture from the Mac command line? We want to do a screen capture of a running emulator. Maybe something like this?

Interesting Things

• Rails 2.3.8 – for nested attributes, ‘_destroy’ is the new ‘_delete’. Looks like the Rails team is on top of it. Use

  @foo.update_attributes(:foo_attributes => {'0' => {:id => '1',  '_destroy' => '1'}})
  

  instead of

  @foo.update_attributes(:foo_attributes => {'0' => {:id => '1',  '_delete' => '1'}})
  

Help

• Determining a users default time zone – someone must have solved this already, right? Well, Javascript only gives you the time offset, which isn’t that useful, but Fleegix has some good support we’ve used on other projects.
• The after_commit gem – we wanted to create an audit entry every time a particular model failed to create successfully. We tried using the after_rollback hook in both our tests and our development environment but it just didn’t work. The before_rollback callback also didn’t work, but the non-rollback callbacks in the gem seemed to behave. Anyone have any thoughts outside of overriding ActiveRecord ourselves?

Interesting Things

• Vows – real async Javascript testing for Node.js. Jasmine does support some async testing, but it sounds like it’s a bit clunky to do.
• Using RVM on the server – is anybody doing this? Apparently not yet, but we had some strongly differing opinions on the matter as to how useful it would be and if it’s the right tool for the job. To be continued…

• Rails 2.3.8 + mongrel_rails + Rack 1.1.0 – cookies do not work. At all. Apparently with Rack, cookies get fed into mongrel_rails as an array, while Mongrel expects them to be a String. Looks like someone already ran into this. The fix is to throw this in a Rails initializer file:

  class Mongrel::CGIWrapper
    def header_with_rails_fix(options = 'text/html')
      @head['cookie'] = options.delete('cookie').flatten.map { |v| v.sub(/^n/,'') } if options.class != String and options['cookie']
      header_without_rails_fix(options)
    end
    alias_method_chain(:header, :rails_fix)
  end if Rails.version == '2.3.8' and Gem.available?('mongrel', Gem::Requirement.new('~>1.1.5')) and self.class.const_defined?(:Mongrel)
  

  (As an aside, running mongrel_rails by using script/server works fine, we only found this issue when running our Webrat Selenium tests, which calls mongrel_rails in some different way that causes this bug to be exposed.)

Help!

• Ey cloud deploy – has anyone done a deploy to EY cloud and seen the Mongrel instances not get bounced?
• Does anyone have any tips on testing distributed applications? We’re looking for the least ugly/painful way to do it well.

Interesting Things

• Rvm and sudo – for goodness sake don’t do it.
• Sass not recompiling on deploys – a few of our projects have seen Sass files not recompile/update for some reason that we’ve yet to track down. So instead of spelunking through Sass code we just force the issue by having a rake task that forces the recompile – see this post for details.
• Rails xhr redirect – one of our projects is using the xhr_redirect plugin to support ajax redirects – careful if you want to use it in your tests – it self-destructs if your Rails environment == ‘test’
• Android meetup tonight at 6:30 PM – check out the details.
• New Redis recipe from EY – following up from yesterday, the new EY recipe to set up Redis appears to work fine with a little tweaking.

Interesting Things

• Redis at EngineYard – EY recently fixed a bug in their system chef scripts that was unintentionally installing Redis, so if you’re relying on it being there you may find it missing on your next deploy. EY has apparently just added a recipe for running Redis on a utility slice in ey-cloud-recipes. We haven’t tried it out yet but at first glance it looks ok. This new recipe doesn’t support running Redis on a solo instance, but it doesn’t look too hard to change it to do that.

• Library reorganization – we here at Pivotal have a library of books we let people ‘check out’. We’ve just reorganized it a bit. Let our local librarians know if it’s working for ya.

• Mobile meetup – there’s a mobile meetup tonight from 6-8 PM tonight at Horatius in Potrero Hill. They’re expecting people from top mobile companies including entrepreneurs, application developers, designers, marketing/business, etc – please RSVP at the Facebook to attend.