#Ruby

In today's post, I discuss enhancing my blog's tag support, moving from a simple comma-separated list to a more powerful and dynamic queryable system using the Ruby gem 'acts-as-taggable-on'. I illustrate the process of installing and migrating the gem with MySQL. I then detail the code for tagging in the Blog model, updating blog forms and controllers. It's crucial to migrate existing tags to the new system, which I did using Maintenance Tasks, including tips for covering edge cases in the tests for the task. Updating existing tests for the blog model to incorporate the new taggable system was the final step. Future considerations include creating a Stimulus Controller for auto-suggested tags and extending this functionality to the Project model.

Jumpstart Pro is a Ruby on Rails SaaS template that streamlines the creation of business-ready web applications, eliminating the need for repetitive coding and configurations. Despite its numerous advantages, maintaining the software can become complex or tedious as applications grow - primarily due to merge conflicts during updates. I share a few strategies I employ to simplify this process, including removing files from the git index that don't require updates, regenerating files like yarn.lock and Gemfile.lock, and refraining from altering core Jumpstart files. I also use a script post-merging to automate the regeneration of these files. These methods have significantly eased the application of Jumpstart Pro updates for me, and I believe they could be beneficial to other developers as well.

Let's explore a process for running Ruby on Rails in Docker with Nginx to handle serving static assets.

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.