Sold on Homebrew
I’ve been a MacPorts user for a very long time, so when I heard about Homebrew, I looked into it, but didn’t see anything compelling enough to convince me to switch. That changed today.
Bundler 1.1 Prerelease is Worth It
In two posts from last year, Pat Shaughnessy discusses why Bundler 1.1 will be much faster and how to use some of the new features. Ordinarily, I avoid prerelease gems because I don’t want to risk the stability of an application. My release schedule won’t often align with a gem’s, assuming there is one.
“I heard you liked files”
Josh Susser on the proliferation of lazily-named configuration files:
Just because your configuration file’s contents are written in a DSL does not mean you should pretend it’s not Ruby anymore.
Unit Testing Cocoa with MacRuby
I spend most of my development time split between Rails and iOS. Each offers a rich API that makes building projects much more productive and enjoyable. There is one place, however, that Ruby clobbers Objective-C: testing.
Pow, IPv6 and localhost
Pow is a new zero-configuration server for Rack web applications by 37Signals. It makes development, especially on multiple applications, painless: it adds a new .dev domain, with individual apps symlinked from ~/.pow. Pow manages application instances automatically and integrates seamlessly with RVM.
MySQL 5.5 on Mac OS X
If you’re (re)building a development workstation on Mac OS X, you may have decided to use the latest MySQL 5.5 packages from mysql.com. Unfortunately, that means you probably have seen (or will soon see) two problems.
SQL Logging: Gemified and Now for Rails 3
Of the handful of plug-ins I’ve written for Rails over the years, the one I install on new projects almost with thinking is sql_logging. I wrote that plug-in almost three years ago and it continues to work on Rails 2.3 apps today.
That isn’t true on Rails 3, though, so over the last few days I’ve taken the time to reevaluate the plug-in and figure out how to do the same work in Rails 3. The result is the new sql-logging gem. The source is hosted on GitHub and the gem itself is available, like any other, on rubygems.org.
Couldn’t find ‘rspec’ generator?
If you’ve moved on to Rails 3 and RSpec 2, but have older projects that are still on Rails 2.3 and RSpec 1.3.x, you may notice that script/generate no longer shows the RSpec generators in them, even if you’ve frozen the correct version of rspec and rspec-rails into vendor/gems.
I’m not sure of the proper place to report this bug, but a quickie workaround is to uninstall the newer rspec-rails gem so that 1.3.x is the newest in gem list.
Bundler Simplified
Following up on my previous post about adapting pre-Bundler workflows to current best practices, Yehuda Katz posted his suggestions on how to approach Bundler in terms of what you used to do. It’s a good read.
One thing that caught me up was the deployment suggestion to require 'bundler/capistrano' in deploy.rb. If you installed Rails 3.0 soon after it was released, you may still have one of the Bundler 1.0 release candidates. I had RC3, and it didn’t include the Capistrano file, which led to a load error. Update your gem, and all will be well.
vendor/rails in the Age of Bundler
I’ve only followed the development of Rails 3.0 from a distance, mainly taking note of the major features and goals for the project and mostly ignoring all the little details that go into it. Once the 3.0 release candidate arrived, I started my next internal project with it and have been slowly coming up to speed on those little details. One that’s stymied me for a while is Bundler.