Recently, I have been exploring options for creating RESTful APIs in the Ruby. Concurrently, I have been investigating Sinatra and its father-framework padrino to create a lighter weight web app. While Sinatra in itself is a suitable solution for APIs, grape is a micro-framework specifically geared towards creating …

While trying to set up a VPS running Ubuntu 14.04 I was unable to compile Ruby 2.1.1 (which was the current version). I kept running into errors such as:

readline.c:1977:26: error: ‘Function’ undeclared ...

The cause is that Ubuntu 14.04 ships with Readline version 6.3 which apparently breaks builds of Ruby and Python. …

While using bundle exec guard I was recieving the following types of warnings:

15:30:07 - INFO - Running all specs
WARN: Unresolved specs during Gem::Specification.reset:
      ffi (>= 0.5.0)
WARN: Clearing out unresolved specs.
Please report a bug if this causes problems.

bundle update did not resolve this problem. …

If you have a Rails 4 project with malfunctioning jQuery the culprit is likely a new feature in Rails 4 called turbolinks. Turbolinks attempts to speed response times by not reloading the header (in fact the whole page) each time a new request is made. Instead, the body of the page is replaced using ajax and json. The …

If you are starting from scratch on a new rails project you may want to start with what is current, which at the moment is Rails 4 and Bootstrap 3. I would suggest setting up RVM or rbenv before continuing.

Install Rails 4:

gem install rails

Ensure you have it:

$ rails -v
Rails 4.0.0

Create your new project with rails: …

For the uninitiated, Strong Parameters is a gem for white-listing attributes that can be mass assigned. This is a replacement for the Rails method of white-listing that ships in 3.x. It also ships standard in Rails 4, so it behooves you to be familiar with it. Herein, I will discuss a few lessons in switch an existing …

• Nested examples and progressive setup are a trade off between DRY and readability

Referencing a bug report in an example via pending

describe "functionality" do
  it "should do something" do
    pending("bug report #78") do
        xyz.function()
    end
  end
end

What is nice here is that …

I noticed a problem while running Guard where it would appear to malfunction and become unresponsive. The tests would still run or at least complete (according to growl), but I wouldn’t see errors and the guard prompt would never return. I wasn’t sure quite why this was happening. Here’s a sample of …

A list of specific blog posts (not written by me) that I believe are helpful for a Rails developer:

Development

• Matt Brictson on Lightning-Fast Sass Reloading in Rails 3.2. How to get CodeKit like reloads with your rails project. This little task is amazing, and will greatly speed stylistic chages.
• Bryan Helmkamp on 7 …

Below is a short review of classes and modules. This post is written so I can cement these concepts for myself. The source material is Metaprogramming Ruby and is mainly a rephrasing of concepts from it. If you would like to understand more, I recommend the book.

Objects

Starting for the bottom, the most basic unit is, …