rails

I recently helped debug Grape#1880, an issue a developer had with HTTP headers in Grape and Rack. It wasn’t immediately obvious.

In the previous post I added a React Native ticking timer. I now have enough client-side parts and it’s time to wire up the client app to a server. This cookbook should be helpf...

In the past few weeks I’ve convinced myself that GraphQL can work well for any micro-service. This post is a full walk-through of getting a working GraphQL API on Ruby on Rails....

I cooked up a little demo of a Slack bot running on Rails with React, that displays messages that you send to Slack, on a web page.

Introducing email-example-spec, integration testing for your ActionMailer e-mails.

I wanted Ruby and JSON code blocks ala Github’s Flavored Markdown when rendering markdown documents in doppler. The idea is that we can API documentation authored in markdown, a...

The first Capybara integration test always tends to timeout when compiling assets on-demand. It’s just damn too slow. Precompile your assets before the test is run.

My family counts many teachers. My grandparents were teachers, my father started as a school English teacher and is now a University professor. My wife changed her successful ca...

Sometimes you send many e-mails with an important URL having the bang first. No big deal. Read about it how to redirect it on the Art.sy Engineering blog.

You should take a serious look at your application and write some tests, first thing Monday.

One of the frequently requested features in Grape is to automatically reload code changes, much like Rails does (#131). This is actually pretty difficult to implement and requir...

Devise has a :trackable _strategy which updates the user’s last sign-in time, remote IP and increments a counter in the _User model upon successful logon. This is implemented in...

I’ve written about delay-processing certain image versions in this article. We’ve made some progress since with a much more robust implementation. Check out this new post on the...

We use the Analytical gem to include various thirdparty Javascript in our Rails application. Our test environment was configured with dummy values in config/analytical.yml.

I posted this to a Ruby forum a while ago.

I love fabricators. We use the awesome fabrication gem that lets you do some pretty neat things in Rails specs.

One of my favorite talks at QCon 2011 was about Webmachine. I was very curious to see what those well-disciplined Erlang people had come up with. At the end of the talk I had le...

Building a software platform is not just an investment in the future, it’s a software architecture philosophy. A proper API is a manifestation of some of the core principles of ...

A while ago I wrote about how we package and push Rails assets to Amazon S3. We version assets with the GIT hash – varying the assets by URL enables setting indefinite cache exp...

I wrote about how we do asset packaging with Rails, how we Jammit and push them to S3 in this post. We’ve had a few surprises since then, one that had to do with compressed asse...

I’m speaking at NYC.rb tonight @ Pivotal Labs, RSVP.

There’s got to be a prettier way of implementing this.

Sometimes you want to support both GET and POST in a Grape API.

Let’s filter out some unwanted browsers from displaying broken pages in our Rails application. We could disallow IE6, for example, but allow IE7, 8 and 9.

A recent post “Rails is Not Your Application” caught my attention. It was fundamentally right, but the suggested implementation was misguided.

Sorting tables in Rails is a common problem. It must have been done before, right? In fact it has been done so many times that it’s really hard to find anything that “just works...

I used to attribute this error to little green elves inside of Capybara, Selenium or Firefox. But, as usual, things turn out to have a much more reasonable explanation.

Our image upload pipeline has gotten a bit too long and no longer fits in the Heroku’s 30-second limit. We generate several image versions and would like to get a couple of size...

We’re using Grape in our Rails app on Heroku, which comes with New Relic instrumentation out-of-the-box. Let’s get the Grape API route details to show in New Relic as well.

Last time we added custom editable mail templates to our mailers and made them Markdown format [read first]. Awesome. Let’s add a preview to the templates with 37-signals mail_v...

Ran into a series of weird bugs with IE9. Turned out that a lot of our API requests were cached on the client. I am not sure whether this is some clever plot to make things work...

You love markdown? We do too.

I’ve been fighting a trivial RoR controller test failure on a new build machine. The spec is rather trivial.

Oh, I know how much you want this!

Inspired by this post on RSpec best practices and updated for RSpec2.

I am having a weird problem with Capybara and Selenium (Firefox) selecting items in a dropdown.

We made some progress with modularizing our Grape API in the last post. But we only had one version and declared Api_v1 as our main API entry. Unless you’re Netflix and need an ...

Yet again I have to deal with 3rd party licenses, this time in RoR. It’s a pretty common thing to do for technical managers and in my last job I ended up creating 3licenses. For...

A lot of people ask me whether we use Rails controllers for our API. We don’t, we use Grape. Grape is a Rack-based system and a DSL that provides a cleaner separation, some API-...

I was a bit surprised to see mongoid drop pagination support in 2.0.2 (here and here). It got some people confused (see mongoid#983). In a project that uses will_paginate, this ...

We’ve been trying to fix an issue with our continuous integration where Capybara tests were failing, but the CI process reported success. Rather annoying for CI!

This one drove me crazy for a while. Compass would fail with “Syntax error: Invalid US-ASCII character “\xE2”. So I checked the files, found nothing changed since last time and ...

There’s a Gem for That Too

When someone says that you need a “100 grams” to figure something out, it means that it’s completely unobvious and complicated and therefore you need a few vodka shots. Vodka in...

Now that we have dealt with exceptions in our API we need to provide various methods of authentication. We’re going to be talking grape and devise.

We’ve been using Grape to provide a RESTful API. Grape is a micro-framework for Ruby that makes it really easy.

I had a nice time today wrapping up the Idee PixMatch API in a Ruby gem. PixMatch is a general image matching engine that allows you to perform large scale image comparisons and...

I am going to say nice things about Oracle software. Brace yourself.

I recently needed to find out the geometry of the image being uploaded via CarrierWave. Images come in many different sizes and shapes. What I want is to have a “best” image and...

I found this quite unusual. I needed to receive an array with some nested hashes part of a query string into a JSON API. Passing encoded JSON wasn’t looking hot. Turns out, in R...

Now that we have a staging and a production environment, we want to copy all production data to staging at the same time as we push new code to staging via continuous integratio...

Today, we will be uploading JPG, BMP or TIFF images to Amazon S3 that are attached to a model.

You’ve heard about continuous deployment. But did you actually try to do it?

Mongoid models provide an excellent level of abstraction. Consider a User model.

I’ve watched many Dan North’s InfoQ videos. I like 95% of what you say, Dan. But your latest Twitter whining on Ruby/Rails #fail have left my 2 y.o. son extremely disappointed. ...

So you’ve built the super amazing complicated Rails website. You are serving data from millions of documents from MongoDB, rendering complex objects using HAML and generally doi...

One thing that has been irritating me is the default Rails app/models directory. It doesn’t support subdirectories, so models that deal with the database and classes that deal w...

Let’s say you have some Ruby file that you want to run on Heroku. For example, I have stuff\things.rb. The easiest way to run the file on Heroku seems to inspire ourselves from ...

This one took a while and required extensive help from a rocket scientist. While running RSpec I got this.

So I’ve been playing with Ruby. Yes, I am using a Windows 7 64-bit laptop and yes, despite the common message from most people on the Internet encouraging me to run Ubuntu, thin...