Igor Davydov div

Instrument Anything in Rails 3

With Rails 3.0 released a few weeks ago I've migrated a few apps and I'm constantly finding useful new improvements. One such improvement is the ability to log anything in the same way that Rails internally logs ActiveRecord and ActionView. By default Rails 3 logs look slightly spiffier than those produced by Rails 2.3: (notice the second line has been cleaned up)

Started GET "/" for 127.0.0.1 at Mon Sep 06 01:07:11 -0400 2010
  Processing by HomeController#index as HTML
  User Load (0.2ms)  SELECT `users`.* FROM `users` WHERE (`users`.`id` = 3) LIMIT 1
  CACHE (0.0ms)  SELECT `users`.* FROM `users` WHERE (`users`.`id` = 3) LIMIT 1

Rendered layouts/_nav.html.erb (363.4ms)

Rails Models

Generating models

$ rails g model User

Associations

belongs_to

has_one

HTTP caching

Kinds of caches

Browser
Proxy
Gateway

TODO Difference between proxy and gateway caches.

I'm a fan of MiniTest::Spec. It strikes a nice balance between the simplicity of TestUnit and the readable syntax of RSpec. When I first switched from RSpec to MiniTest::Spec, one thing I was worried I would miss was the ability to add matchers. (A note in terminology: "matchers" in MiniTest::Spec refer to something completely different than "matchers" in RSpec. I won't get into it, but from now on, let's use the proper term: "expectations").

Understanding MiniTest::Expectations

Let's take a look in the code (I'm specifically referring to the gem, not the standard library that's built into Ruby 1.9):

# minitest/spec.rb

module MiniTest::Expectations

A Capistrano Rails Guide

by Jonathan Rochkind, http://bibwild.wordpress.com

why cap?

Capistrano automates pushing out a new version of your application to a deployment location.

I've been writing and deploying Rails apps for a while, but I avoided using Capistrano until recently. I've got a pretty simple one-host deployment, and even though everyone said Capistrano was great, every time I tried to get started I just got snowed under not being able to figure out exactly what I wanted to do, and figured I wasn't having that much trouble doing it "manually".

	# RSpec 2.0 syntax Cheet Sheet by http://ApproachE.com

	# defining spec within a module will automatically pick Player::MovieList as a 'subject' (see below)
	module Player
	describe MovieList, "with optional description" do

	it "is pending example, so that you can write ones quickly"

	it "is already working example that we want to suspend from failing temporarily" do
	pending("working on another feature that temporarily breaks this one")

	<!DOCTYPE HTML>
	<html lang="en">
	<head>
	<meta charset="UTF-8">
	<title></title>
	<style>
	ul { float:left; margin-right:20px; }

	body { color:white; font-family:Helvetica, sans-serif; text-shadow:1px 1px 1px rgba(0,0,0,0.2); }
	ul { width:512px; overflow:hidden; border-radius:6px; }

	module RedisHelper
	# decode Redis value back to Ruby object
	def self.decode(json)
	self.new(ActiveSupport::JSON.decode(json)["#{self.name.downcase}"])
	end

	# encode Ruby object for Redis
	def encoded
	self.updated_at = nil
	self.to_json

	# Run me with:
	#
	# $ nginx -p /path/to/this/file/ -c nginx.conf
	#
	# All requests are then routed to authenticated user's index, so
	#
	# GET http://user:password@localhost:8080/_search?q=*
	#
	# is rewritten to:
	#

	set :sync_directories, ["public/assets", "public/galleries"]
	set :sync_backups, 3