We use AsciiDoc as the format for our documentation for the user group project. AsciiDoc is a bit like Markdown, but it supports multi-file documents out of the box and without any quirks. We use the Ruby app Asciidoctor to turn our AsciiDoc files into a PDF as part of our build job. Since building …
After the preparations of the last weeks, it is now time to put everything together and run our Rails application in a dev container. Prerequisites Rails is a Ruby web framework and therefore needs a Ruby image as a starting point. Please follow my post “Dev Container for Ruby Apps” to figure out what …
Last week we looked at the reason why we should use dev containers to write code. This week we create a dev container to develop a Ruby application on a machine that has no Ruby installed. Why would you do that? Tools like rbenv are a great help to manage your Ruby environments. However, getting …
Ruby on Rails evolves quickly. It may not look like that, but when you go back to your applications, you find them most likely a few versions behind the current stable release. Unfortunately, you cannot simply jump from your current version to the newest one. Instead, you need to upgrade from one major version to …
Managing the whole development environment is often a lot of work. You need to get the right tools in the right version and the paths and other environment settings must all be right – or you go on an endless hunt for one problem after another. If you work with Ruby you should look at …
One of the main purposes of continuous integration is to know when your build fails. As soon as a problem is detected you want to be alarmed. But in certain situations you can accept a failed build. Today I will show you how to use a build matrix in Travis CI to allow failures for …
As experience shows the quality of code degrades slowly and before you know it will be an unmaintainable mess. To prevent this many practices where developed and have proven their usefulness over and over again: test automation, continuous integration and code analysis are just a few of them. Unfortunately those practices still require work and …
Refactoring is a technique I often use but know I still have a lot to learn, especially when I see a presentation like Therapeutic Refactoring. So I was very excited when the organizers of the Barcelona Ruby Conference announced the pre-conference workshop “Refactoring Rails Applications” by JumpstartLab. It may sound strange to attend a refactoring …