Blog

February 14, 2018

System Tests with RSpec, Rails, Capybara, and Devise

Since the release of RSpec 3.7 we’ve been able to take advantage of system tests which are new as of Rails 5.1. If you’ve been using RSpec for a while you’re already likely familiar with feature tests using Capybara. For those new to these types of tests: they allow us to test the actual actions of a user. Clicki...

March 30, 2017

ActionMailer SMTP settings for SendGrid (Rails)

Okay, I got no Google hits for this. Here’s a tip if you’re using SendGrid in a Rails app for your transactional emails. A while back you needed to provide your SendGrid username and password (hopefully via environment variables), but now you can use an app-specific api key.

Here’s some historical context. This ...

March 2, 2016

Heroku defaults to Puma for Rails 5

It’s now going to be easier than ever to kick off a new Rails project and deploy to Heroku. WEBrick is no longer the default server with Rails 5. If you don’t provide a Procfile Heroku is going to help you out and set you up with Puma. Production ready out of the box. So… that’s cool.

Also of note, configurati...

February 8, 2016

How to Create a Contact Form Using Rails and Mandrill

Let’s build a simple contact form for your Rails driven website that uses Mandrill as the desired email server. Mandrill lets us offload the management of setting up and running an email server ourselves and, therefore, relieving ourselves of a massive headache. Mandrill starts you with 2,000 free trial sends which i...

February 1, 2016

Syntax Highlighting in Rails

Your Rails driven website has the need to display some code. It’s not good enough to just get proper indentation, you’d like to have some decent syntax highlighting. Maybe something like following.

There’s a great ruby gem called Rouge that makes this process quite easy for us. What is Rouge?

Pretty cool, letâ€...

January 18, 2016

Editing a form using fields_for in Rails

Let’s say you’d like to successfully create or update a nested form using fields_for. Our ‘parent’ will be a Post model and our ‘child’ will be a Tag model. It’s not hard, but there’s a bit of a gotcha that I found most other resources out there were leaving out.

We’ll use a Post model as our parent ...