Rails 3 + Cucumber

Cucumber is a great gem to describe features.

To setup with Rails 3, we will need to use the README documentation on Github.

1) Include the necessary gems

2) $ bundle install

3) $ rails g cucumber:install --rspec --capybara

Generate a Feature

4) rails g cucumber:feature post title:string description:text published:boolean

5) rails g scaffold post title:string description:text published:boolean

6) rake db:migrate

7) Comment out the line require 'cucumber/rails/capybara_javascript_emulation' in /features/support/env.rb

8) rake cucumber

Creating a Gem with Bundler

Bundler is really cool in that it helps manage gem dependencies and its a default in Rails 3.

There is a guide on Github on starting a gem with Bundler and an article by Nick Quaranto on gem hello world.

Using those information, i am going to run through steps to start making a gem.

Step 1

$ bundle gem awesome-stuff

Step 2

Make some changes to .gemspec

Step 3

Put the logic in /lib/awesome-stuff

Step 4

require the rb files in /lib/awesome-stuff.rb

Step 5

$ git add .

$ git commit -m "My first gem commit"

Step 6

$ gem build awesome-stuff.gemspec

$ gem install awesome-stuff-0.0.1.gem

Now fire up Interactive Ruby (irb)

> require 'rubygems'

> require 'awesome-stuff'

> Awesome::Pop.makeSomeNoise

> Hello Gem!

> => nil

It works!

The github documentation has some information on using Rspec and Gem Dependencies stuff that you might be interested.

And share the gem with the rest of the world.

NoSql on Rails with MongoDB

It is possible to implement non-relational database (without SQL) to store data on Rails.

The definition of NoSql

Wikipedia NoSql

Heroku's cloud support for NoSql and why it matters?

NoSql, Heroku and You

Article that apparently got Rubyists notice about NoSql

Why I think MongoDB to Database is Rails to Framework

And get started to implementing NoSql

1) Install MongoDB

Installing MongoDB on OSX

2) Setup MongoDB for Rails 3

Getting Started with MongoDB on Rails 3

3) Examples and explanations by Ryan Bates

Railscasts MongoDB and MongoMapper

ASCIIcast MongoDB and MongoMapper

4) More info about MongoMapper

Mongo Mapper, the Red Mongo Wrapper

5) Thinking of using Heroku as your host?

Install the MongoHQ addon and configure your app for it

There is also a cloud host for MongoDb, MongoHQ

MongoHQ

Connecting MongoHq with MongoMapper to Rails app

Livereload

A great tool to prevent frequent reloads every time changes to Javascript, CSS, or HTML is made.

Get Livereload.

Feedzirra on Rails 3

Feedzirra is a gem that helps to easily parse RSS feed.

To get Feedzirra to work with Rails 3, we will need to do a few stuff.

We will include the required gem in the gemfile. Add,

gem 'nokogiri', '1.4.1'

group :after_initialize do

gem "feedzirra"

end

then run bundle install to make sure we have the gem good

At the config/boot.rb

Add Bundler.require :after_initialize below Bundler setup

Then we should be able to kick start using Feedzirra, refer to the links below for more info.

Feedzirra

Railscasts 168 - Feed Parsing

Rspec with Rails 3

First of all, we will need to setup Rspec on Rails 3,

sudo gem install rspec

sudo gem install rspec-rails --pre

Then we include them in our gemfile,

gem 'rspec'

gem 'rspec-rails'

Then we will run the generator:install,

rails g rspec:install

which will provide us with all the files/directory that we need to use Rspec

For a more robust TDD/BDD, we could install autotest. This would assure that each time we edit the test file, the Rspec test will be conducted automatically without the need of us typing the command out.

gem install autotest

gem install autotest-fsevent

gem install autotest-growl (For some reason i still couldn't set it up to work with Growl for OSX)

Open the autotest file,

mate ~/.autotest

Add these 2 lines to the file

require "autotest/fsevent"

require "autotest/growl"

Kick it off with

autotest

If we are testing model, be sure to do

rake db:test:prepare

or Rspec will complain.

More information and documentation can be found at:-

http://rspec.info/

http://github.com/rspec/rspec-rails

http://blog.davidchelimsky.net/2010/01/12/rspec-2-and-rails-3/

http://ph7spot.com/musings/getting-started-with-autotest

Upgrading a Rails 2 App to Rails 3

Most of us have Rails 2 Application in our stash and it would be nice to support the latest Rails 3 since some day the Rails 2 methods and architecture will be deprecated.

Some of the useful reads are Simon Carletti's Blog, Rails Dispatch, and omgbloglol.

So what you can do to upgrade an existing app is by running a (rails generate new app) on an existing Rails 2 application.

Say your previous Rails 2 app is in a folder titled "blogApp", then run

rails blogApp

It doesn't exactly forcefully overwrite the entire folder, but it prompts you if you wanna keep this particular file or if you wanna update it, and it also adds all the files that Rails 3 need like gemfile bundler, new rails.rb in the script folder, and so on.

Based on omgbloglol, it would probably be a save bet to overwrite these files:-

• Rakefile
• README
• config/boot.rb
• public/404.html (unless you’ve customized it)
• public/500.html (unless you’ve customized it)
• public/javascripts/* (if you don’t have a lot of version dependent custom JavaScript)
• script/* (they probably wouldn’t work with the new Rails 3 stuff in their old form anyhow)

And depending on our needs, we might or might not wanna overwrite these :-

• .gitignore (unless you don’t really care; the new standard one is pretty good)
• app/helpers/application_helper.rb
• config/routes.rb
• config/environment.rb
• config/environments/* (unless you haven’t touched these as many people don’t)
• config/database.yml
• doc/README_FOR_APP (you do write this, don’t you?)
• test/test_helper.rb

By doing that, we pretty much have the boilerplate of a Rails 3 application and all we have to do is tweak the codes to conform to Rails 3.

1. Moving gem to gemfile Bundler
2. Moving the configurations from config/environment.rb to config/application.rb
3. Routers new syntax
4. etc..

And you can find the steps for the upgrade at omgbloglol, which to me is pretty comprehensive.

Let the Rails 3 Migration begin.