Ruby flew too

What do you do when you love your spec testing with Capybara but you want to veer off the beaten path of Rspec and forge ahead into MiniTest waters? Follow along, and you'll have not one, but two working solutions. The setup Quickly now, let's throw together an app to test this out. I'm on rails 3.2.9. $ rails new minicap Edit the Gemfile to include a test and development block group :development, :test do gem 'capybara' gem 'database_cleaner' end Note the inclusion of database_cleaner as per the capybara documentation And bundle: $ bundle We will, of course, need something to test against, so for the sake of it, lets throw together a scaffold, migrate our database and prepare our test database all in one big lump. If you are unclear on any of this, go read the guides . $ rails g scaffold Book name:string author:string $ rake db:migrate $ rake db:test:prepare Make it minitest To make rails use minitest , we simply add a require ...

Rails has a lovely feature as part of ActiveRecord - Callbacks; to wit: Callbacks are hooks into the life cycle of an Active Record object that allow you to trigger logic before or after an alteration of the object state Basically, that means that you can instruct Rails to execute your own code throughout the process of creating, updating and destroying objects/records. You can, for example, use them to set some default values on create, or perhaps do some last minute validation, or even fire an event just after you've saved a record. The available callbacks are: after_initialize after_find after_touch before_validation after_validation before_save around_save after_save before_create around_create after_create before_update around_update after_update :before_destroy around_destroy after_destroy after_commit after_rollback At the same time, Ruby methods have the concept of implicit return values. That is to say, any method will return the value of the la...

There are always times when you need to override the default RESTful routes in Rails. The most common case for this is mapping a /logout url to a session#destroy controller and action. However, this simple example doesn't really help when you want to achieve something a little more intricate - for example using a completely different url for a resource. Examples include a blog when you want your urls to add blog posts to be /add rather than blogs/new. Or what about a application with a Users model that has different types of users that can be added - perhaps it is a medical database and you have Doctors and Nurses - you want your urls to reflect the kind of person you are adding or editing - so doctor/new or nurse/new rather than users/new. Mapping urls like this is easy. However there is a little gotcha that you have to be aware of. Let's walk through an example and we'll see how to make it work New project We'll create a simple project for this example - a hypoth...

Some thoughts on the Padrino and Rails . For the past few weeks, I've been working on a small project that is using Padrino rather than Rails. The interesting thing was that the decision for the technology was based on the idea that the project was only going to have a few objects; at most five or six and as such, didn't need something as large, complex or weighty as Rails . However, something as barebones as Sinatra would not allow for some of the more rapid application development that you get from some of the baked in goodness of Rails - things like Sessions, Flash, Form helpers and generators all speed up development fairly considerably. With that in mind, Padrino was the framework of choice. Now Padrino is interesting. It's a great little framework, but, the temptation is to look at it's relative light-weightedness in comparison to Rails and think it will require less learning time or up-front knowledge for someone with little experience of the framework or of so...

Last time I did a quick RVM install guide for Linux Mint . This time I'm going to finish up by installing rails so we can rock some new development work. Nothing like a clean and humming system I tell you. Let's begin by making sure we have git - we are going to be using it anyway. Fire up your terminal (Ctrl-Alt-T) and type sudo apt-get install git Great - version control level unlocked. We should have rubygems installed already (if you followed along with the RVM install then this is all taken care of). Now, to make sure RVM functions well, see this https://rvm.io/integration/gnome-terminal/ . Or, if you prefer, just move the commands from .bash_login to .bash_profile. As I understand it, and I'm no Linux guru, .bash_login doesn't run if .bash_profile is present. I'm going to create a gemset to install rails 3, just for fun...and just in case I want to go back and work on some legacy apps. rvm gemset create rails3.2 And set it so it is the default gems...

Linux Mint has captured my imagination recently, and of course a fresh install means getting my dev environment up and running again. I'm using the cinnamon version and so far things are going well. Everything on my laptop is just working; suspend, all the various function keys. Support out of the box is good. I'm impressed. The experience is soooo much better than the last time I tried a more full featured distro and things got so bad with video drivers crashing and causing my fan to spin up constantly that I ended up going totally minimal with Arch and just a command line. I like arch, but I thought I would give Mint a go. So, now we need to get Ruby, RVM and Rails on the go so we can do some web development. Let's start with RVM. Next time I'll take a crack at installing Rails on Mint First things first - we need curl. My install didn't have it so.....fire up the terminal with Ctrl-Alt-T and type the following sudo apt-get install curl Next up, install RV...

If you are running into this little bug when running either rake or rails generate task then you can usually solve it pretty quickly by adding the following two gems into your Gemfile: gem 'execjs' gem 'therubyracer' For rails noobs, Gemfile is in your application root.