At work, we recently got all of our spec passing and determined that we needed to stay on top of keeping the test suite updated so that we knew that the quality of our product wasn’t compromised. To solve this, we implemented continuous integration with CruiseControl.rb.
Continuous Integration
The idea is to provide regular checks on the quality of your code. In our case, this means running the RSpec tests we’ve written for our Ruby on Rails application. Each time we commit to our git repository, CruiseControl connects to the repository and pulls down the latest code. It then runs all of our tests to let us know if anything has been broken in the latest commits. It provides a visible check to the entire team letting us know if someone committed broken code.
Have you ever wished you could start out your Rails application with all of your gems installed and all of your standard setup items completed? Well, wait no longer. You can now do it with Rails Templates. Pratik covered it pretty well, so I’m not going to repeat what he’s done. Rather, I’m going to share a template of my own and explain why I included what I did.
One problem that seems to face people when they’re attempting to move their applications into production is the best way to manage deployment of their application. This is where tools like capistrano comes in.
Capistrano was written by Jamis Buck of 37signals. In a lot of ways it has become the defacto way to deploy Ruby on Rails applications. It has also had tools like webistrano build on top of it to provide a graphical interface to the command line tool.
To get started, you need to install the capistrano gem:
This is my first screencast. I’ve learned a lot about recording screencasts while doing this. The screencast was recorded using a free trial of Camtasia for Mac. The trial is up in 30 days, so I’d really appreciate donations to help me get ScreenFlow so I can continue to produce screencasts.
In the meantime, here’s a basic rundown of the 4 basic types of routes in Ruby on Rails.
Ruby on Rails gives you some simple but powerful tools for mapping URL’s and HTTP Verbs to your Controllers and Views. Here is a simple walkthrough of 4 of these ‘Routes’: default routes, regular routes, named routes, and RESTful routes.
I just started building a new Rails application in version 2.3.4. One feature that I thought was particularly handy is the data seeding that is now built into Ruby on Rails.
Before this feature, you would have to do one of two things. You could seed your data in your migrations. The problem with this approach is that it clutters up your migrations, and can make for more brittle migrations. It also may or may not propagate to your test database when you run your tests, meaning that if you’re counting on it, it may not bee there.
Your second option was to create fixtures and a rake task to import the fixture data into your Rails application. The problem with this is the need to create multiple related objects across multiple files to make all of your data match up, which can create maintenance problems.
So, without further ado, here is the solution now included in Rails. You simple create a file at db/seeds.rb and place ActiveRecord create calls in the file. Here’s an example seeds.rb. Read More
