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Testing an abstract controller (like ApplicationController)

2010-01-28T14:28:00Z

This is one way to test before_filters in your ApplicationController or other abstract controllers. Make sure you don’t miss the “after” part!

One thing to keep in mind though is that re-loading the routes can take some serious time (6 seconds in the app Im working on). I’d like to find a better way of testing this.

require File.dirname(__FILE__) + '/../../spec_helper'

describe ApplicationController do

  class TestController < ApplicationController
    def index
    end
  end

  controller_name :test

  before :each do
    ActionController::Routing::Routes.draw do |map| 
      map.resources :test
    end
  end

  after :all do
    load(RAILS_ROOT + "/config/routes.rb")
  end

  it "should do something" do
    get :index
    # assert stuff
  end

end

How to check if a file exists on a remote server (HEAD request)

2009-05-21T12:43:00Z

Here is some code to check if a file exists on a remote server by using a HEAD request. It can optionally check if the content type is what you expected (if you for example want to only allow “audio/mpeg” links). Note that this particular implementation only works with http urls.

require 'net/http'

def exists?(file)
  begin
    # Support for both good and bad URI's
    uri = URI.parse(URI.escape(URI.unescape(file)))
    response = nil
     Net::HTTP.start(uri.host, uri.port) {|http|
       response = http.head(uri.path)
     }
     # .. response.content_type == "audio/mpeg"
     response.code == "200"
  rescue
    false
  end
end

puts exists?('http://djspike.se/files/albums/6/31/DJ_SPIKE%20-%20Tight%20(demo).mp3')

I also found a plugin with similar goals but that actually downloads the entire target file instead of only getting the header (not a good idea when dealing with media files): http://www.igvita.com/2006/09/07/validating-url-in-ruby-on-rails/

How to disable Globalize's ActiveRecord logging

2009-05-20T07:56:00Z

Here is how you disable the sometimes excessive logging that Globalize does:

# Disables Globalize's ActiveRecord logging
module Globalize
 class DbViewTranslator
   alias_method :orig_fetch_view_translation, :fetch_view_translation   
   def fetch_view_translation(key, language, idx, namespace = nil, original_caller = nil)
     ActiveRecord::Base.silence do
       orig_fetch_view_translation(key, language, idx, namespace, original_caller)
     end
   end
 end
end

This tip is originally from http://www.artweb-design.de/2007/9/16/disable-globalize-viewtranslation-sql-logging, but I had to adapt it a bit to work with my globalize version.

If this does not work with your version of globalize, then just check how it’s implemented in “lib/globalize/localization/db_view_translator.rb” and adapt the patch.

Using Ruby EE in development

2009-05-19T06:43:00Z

It’s common knowledge that using Ruby Enterprise Edition on your server is a good idea, but how many of us use it on our development boxes?

I recently started using Ruby EE in my development environment and it has decreased the time it takes to run my specs with about 20% as compared to Ruby 1.8.6.

Installing mysql and the mysql gem on Mac OS X Leopard

2009-05-15T08:52:00Z

I had some trouble getting the mysql gem to work in Leopard on my new macbook and it turned out that I had installed the 64bit version of mysql and even though the mysql gem compiles against that, it does not work.

To begin with I got alerted to this by the warning message:

DEPRECATION WARNING: You’re using the Ruby-based MySQL library that ships with Rails…

The kinds of errors you might see when using the 64 bit version of mysql is:

LoadError: Failed to lookup Init function /usr/lib/ruby-ee/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/mysql-2.7/lib/mysql.bundle

How to install a version that works:

1) Get the 32 bit x86 version from http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/mysql/5.0.html#macosx-dmg and install.

3) Make sure you got it installed propertly (open a terminal and type mysql -v).

env ARCHFLAGS="-arch i386" sudo gem install mysql --
--with-mysql-config=/usr/local/mysql/bin/mysql_config

5) Done :)

Script to show CruiseControl status with lava lamps

2009-04-03T16:11:00Z

We've been using this script at work to show the build status using lava lamps =).

To control the lamps we use a TellStick which is a transmitter that plugs into USB and lets us control wireless remote switches.

http://gist.github.com/89810:

Acts as state machine not saving to the database?

2009-01-20T17:18:00Z

Just wasted a bit of time figuring out why my tests ran just fine, while trying to enter a state when actually using the app failed. Turns out that because I do not touch the database in my state machine specs I had no chance of discovering that I had written “aasm_event :foo! do” instead of “aasm_event :foo do” (see that extra “!”?)... D’oh. Hope this can be of help to anyone else that accidentally adds an ! to a aasm_event :).

Increasing the maximum build log size for CruiseControl.rb

2009-01-15T17:12:00Z

I used the following to allow logs larger than 100KB in CruiseControl.rb:

 # Number of times more logging than the default 
 MORE_LOGGING = 5

 Build.class_eval do

   def contents_for_display(file)
     return '' unless File.file?(file) && File.readable?(file)
     if File.size(file) < 100 * 1024 * MORE_LOGGING
       File.read(file)
     else
       contents = File.read(file, 100 * MORE_LOGGING)
       "#{file} is over #{100 * MORE_LOGGING} kbytes - too big to
        display in the dashboard, output is truncated\n\n\n#{contents}"
     end
   end

 end

Temporaraly disable Kernel.warn (stderr)

2008-12-18T13:02:00Z

If you call some code that print warnings to stderr (like Kernel.warn) that can be safetly ignored, you can use this trick to temporaraly turn off stderr:

  $stderr = File.open('/dev/null', 'w')
  code_that_prints_to_stderr
  $stderr = STDERR

Or you cound wrap it in a block:

  def disable_warnings
    $stderr = File.open('/dev/null', 'w')
    yield
    $stderr = STDERR
  end

  disable_warnings do
    code_that_prints_to_stderr
  end

Update: Just learned that if you’re in the context of a rails app you can do:

  silence_warnings do
    code_that_prints_to_stderr
  end

Testing filter_parameter_logging using RSpec

2008-10-29T16:27:00Z

One way of speccing parameter filtering.

Controller:

    filter_parameter_logging :password

Spec:

    it "should filter password" do
      before_filter, after_filter = {}, {}
      before_filter['user'] = { 'username'=>'foo', 'password'=>'bar' }
      after_filter['user'] = { 'username'=>'foo', 'password'=>'[FILTERED]' }      
      controller.filter_parameters(before_filter).should == after_filter
    end

Localized dates in rails using JQuery

2008-10-20T08:08:00Z

A little snipplet for localizing dates clientside with some unobtrusive javascript. Please note that this does result in different outputs in different browsers. I’ve used a regexp to remove the time difference (ex. GMT+2000) to give it a cleaner look.

On the server side simply print the date:

   <div class="date"><%= @user.created_at %></div>

Then in your javascript (for example application.js), do something like this:

    jQuery.each($(".date"), function() {        
      var new_date = new Date(Date.parse($(this).text())).toLocaleString();
      new_date = new_date.replace(/((GMT|UTC)[+-]((\d{4})|(\d{2}:\d{2})))|(\(.+\))/gi, '');
      $(this).text(new_date);
    });

I have verified that this works in Firefox, Opera, Safari, Chrome and IE7.

Merb client for hoptoad

2008-08-12T11:13:00Z

I’ve written a basic merb client for hoptoad (an online exception logger), you can find it at: http://github.com/joakimk/hoptoad_notifier_merb

Installing GitNub

2008-08-01T08:06:00Z

A script to install the GitNub utility (MacOSX Leopard).

Update: Had some problems when I reinstalled this version but it seems that they have fixed it in the latest version.

wget http://s3.amazonaws.com/caged/releases/GitNub_0.9.0.zip
unzip -o GitNub_0.9.0.zip
cd GitNub
sudo cp -r GitNub.app /Applications
sudo cp nub /usr/local/bin
cd ..
rm -rf GitNub GitNub_0.9.0.zip
sudo /System/Library/Frameworks/Ruby.framework/Versions/1.8/usr/bin/gem install open4

Added the special install line for open4 because of issues others had with it (10810 errors)...

To open a repo, just type ‘nub’ in a git repo.

RSpec controller specs gotcha...

2008-06-29T12:31:00Z

Another little tip. If you’re using an IP-based check for access (for example an before_filter in application.rb), the controller specs will fail (silently) to do anything for the ‘get’, ‘put’, ‘update’, ... unless you include ‘0.0.0.0’ as a valid ip.

SQLite3 problem on Ubuntu

2008-06-29T10:04:00Z

If you install the “sqlite3-ruby” gem and it prints something like this:

Building native extensions.  This could take a while...
Successfully installed sqlite3-ruby-1.2.2
1 gem installed
Installing ri documentation for sqlite3-ruby-1.2.2...
Installing RDoc documentation for sqlite3-ruby-1.2.2...

And when you try to use it in your rails application you get an error like this:

rake aborted!
no such file to load -- sqlite3/database

(See full trace by running task with --trace)

You’re probably missing the libsqlite3-ruby package.

sudo apt-get install libsqlite3-ruby