#Ruby

I have been developing Ruby on Rails apps in Docker for several years now. I couldn't imagine not using Docker for serving my projects at this point! See how I build docker images meant to be run in production for my Ruby on Rails projects.

I spent some time over the weekend getting familiar with RSpec. Gonna brain dump (with just a little bit of structure) the process and what I did and learned. To start I set up in a new rails project and kinda tweaked it into a place where I can be productive.

I was asked recently if I could explain the difference between length, size, and count for ActiveRecord models in Ruby on Rails. Unfortunately I had no answer. But I wanted to really understand so I dug into the API docs.

Ruby doesn't have the concept of an interface. Unlike say, PHP. In PHP you can specify that a class has to act like or implement specific methods. If your class fails to honor the contract of that interface and does not implement the methods of the interface, you get an error during runtime. Ruby does not have this. But we can ensure our code honors the contract of an interface by writing unit tests for our classes.

Ruby on Rails is quickly becoming my framework of choice for my personal websites and projects. It's a pleasure to work with and has been easy to learn. But no framework is without its challenges. One of those challenges is of course deploying the app to a server. There are a lot of options for hosting and deploying a Rails app. But, I like to run my own servers which means I have to also take care of deploying to those servers. I'd prefer to be deploying images to AWS ECS but I don't need that kind of infrastructure for my personal website. It's just a blog it can suffer seconds of downtime when I deploy updates. So my approach these days is to use Ansible to handle the deploy steps.

Create a systemd service to run your rails app server.