Integrating with other services is on the roadmap of almost any SaaS application. There’s only so much your application can do itself. Sometimes it’s best to leave tasks up to others who specialize on them.
More than once writing view code for a Rails application ends up with a messy template file. The separation of structure and style doesn’t always work out as intended. Frameworks like Bootstrap force you to use nested structures and lots of class attributes. The view code ends up with a lot of duplication and is hard to read as a result. You’ll get away with that for a while, constantly fearing the next redesign…
Sometimes, when testing your code with RSpec, you’ll notice similarities and duplication between your spec files. Most of these will involve setup that doesn’t say much about the object under test. There’s something that helps you to reduce this duplication: Custom example groups! RSpec itself (rspec-rails) uses example groups for the different types of tests for models, controllers, helpers and views. In the following I’ll show you how to use them to reduce duplication and improve your tests.
Yesterday I decided to give Phusion Passenger aka mod_rails a try and installed it. It was dead simple to set it up and to deploy rails applications with it. I’m now using it for several “small” applications, for which the whole overhead of setting up a cluster of mongrels and a proxy doesn’t seem to be adequate. I’ll give you a short summary on how to install mod_rails for apache2 on Debian Etch.
Typing SSH passwords again and again can be a real pain. For example:
Lately I started to use Capistrano to deploy
my rails applications. If I want to set up the maintenance-page on the
server I’ll type cap deploy:web:disable which of course
prompts me for the SSH password. Then I want to deploy my application
with cap deploy and again will be prompted for the
password. Finally I have to cap deploy:web:enable to remove
the maintenance page which as mindful readers might have guessed
already prompts for the password. This was just one reason for me to
set up SSH authentication keys. At first I was a little worried that
setting it up might be a bit complicated. Luckily I was disabused. If
you want to switch to key based authentication too follow these simple
steps.