Today I Learned

A Hashrocket project

250 posts by jakeworth @jwworth

Allow an Empty Commit

Today my pair did something I’d never seen: create an empty commit. Out goal was to test a third-party integration, but we didn’t have a meaningful change to contribute at the time. In this situation, I think an empty commit is a good compromise, because it’s honest about our intent— to simply kick off a remote process.

Here was the command:

$ git commit --allow-empty

h/t Dorian Karter

Fork A Heroku Project

The Heroku CLI has a useful command I recently learned about, called heroku fork. Here’s how it works:

$ heroku fork --from tilex-staging --to tilex

As the example suggests, I’ve used this tool to clone a tricky-to-set-up Heroku staging application as a production application. It’s great.

The bad news is that Heroku us sunsetting fork as a core CLI command. Use it while you can. After that, you can fork the Github repo and use it as CLI plugin.

Refresh A Twitter Summary Card Image

Twitter provides a feature called summary card images: if you’ve ever seen a tweet with a rectangular image included, that’s it. We can specify this image via HTML meta tags. Most tweets from the @hashrocketil follow this pattern.

Changing the image is tricky, however, because Twitter caches summary cards for an unknown amount of time (I’ve read one week). Which means past and future Tweets could include an outdated image for a while.

One solution is to use Twitter’s card validator on your site. Running the site it through the validator seems to refresh the cache for your summary cards.

Mass-Delete Git Tags

Building off this post:

I’m an advocate of Semantic Version tagging. It communicates to a team about every deploy and makes that rare rollback easier. So when does it not make sense to use a tag?

When you’re the only developer (nobody to communicate with except yourself), and also using a platform like Heroku that tags every release (your tags are redundant). This the case with my blog, so today I set out to delete all my Git tags.

First, delete them remotely (assuming a remote named origin):

$ git tag | xargs git push --delete origin

We also have to delete our local tags, or a tag push with create them again on the remote:

$ git tag | xargs git tag -d

$ git tag now returns nothing, and there are no remote tags.

Netrw Special Command

Building off this previous post, today I learned a new command in Netrw: the ‘special command’.

When navigating, enter x over any file, and your operating system will open it with its tool of choice (Preview for images and Finder for directories on a Mac, etc.). This is great for exploring a directory.

From the Netrw help:

Certain files, such as html, gif, jpeg, (word/office) doc, etc, files, are
best seen with a special handler (ie. a tool provided with your computer's
operating system).  Netrw allows one to invoke such special handlers by:

        * when Exploring, hit the "x" key
        * when editing, hit gx with the cursor atop the special filename
          (latter not available if the g:netrw_nogx variable exists)

Send SQL to a Tmux Window

Hashrocket.vim provides a mapping that is awesome:

autocmd FileType sql nmap <buffer> <leader>t :<C-U>w \| call Send_to_Tmux("\\i ".expand("%")."\n")<CR>

With this command, if you’re editing an SQL file in a Tmux session, run <leader>t from normal mode, and your file will be read into the session and window of your choice. If there’s a psql session listening there, you’ve got a fast way to iterate on an SQL statement from Vim.

The command even writes the file for you before sending the SQL.

When Was This File Added to Version Control?

I learned a helpful Git command today. To determine when a file was added to version control, run the following:

$ git log --follow --diff-filter=A <filename>

This returns the Git history, following files through renames, filtering on when a file was added to version control. Here’s the output for the README of ‘Today I Learned’:

$ git log --follow --diff-filter=A README.md
commit 9a7984a48db19489bb4113378298ddaa97121c7a
Author: Jake Worth <dev+jwworth@hashrocket.com>
Date:   Sat Mar 28 12:52:19 2015 -0400

    Add a basic README

Useful for explaining mystery files in the repository 🔎.

Related File in Rails.vim

Rails.vim is a staple of our Hashrocket workstations. It continues to surprise me.

Today I discovered the :R (related) command, which is a counterpart to the :A (alternate) command. :R looks for the file related to your current buffer.

This command is sophisticated. Assuming you’re following Rails conventions for file organization, :R over most templates will open the associated controller, with your cursor on the line where the action that corresponds with the view name (show for a template called show.html.erb) is defined. The same thing works in reverse; :R over the show method leads you back to show.html.erb.

Re-mark a Word as Bad

Vim’s spell checking feature is pretty great. I use it as a default for .md and .rdoc files on my machine.

Sometimes it incorrectly marks technical words like ‘ExUnit’ as bad (misspelled). To fix this, I type zg over the word in normal mode, which adds it to a list of white-listed words that are no longer considered bad.

The opposite of that command is zw, which comments out the line in the dictionary file. Run :runtime spell/cleanadd.vim to clean up those comments.

Revealing Rails Scopes

I’ve been working on some Rails code that brings in ActiveRecord models from multiple gems. Often these models have default scopes, that bane of a legacy Rails codebase, and figuring that out requires source diving one or more gems. Today I hacked my way to a faster solution: just read the SQL Rails generates.

Here’s a post without a default scope, and then one with a default scope:

pry(main)> Post.all.to_sql
=> "SELECT \"posts\".* FROM \"posts\""
pry(main)> Developer.all.to_sql
=> "SELECT \"developers\".* FROM \"developers\" ORDER BY \"developers\".\"username\" ASC"

I see you, ORDER BY.

RSpec Covers a Range

Today I used a feature of RSpec I’ve never used before, cover.

cover returns true if it’s argument is covered by the given range:

expect(0..1).to cover(order.risk_score)

In my use case, I had an attribute risk_score that is calculated by a third-party API. It should always be between zero and one, but it changes on every test run because the API considers the test user more and more risky each time. cover allowed me to test this attribute, and the underlying logic, in a flexible way.

Logrotation for a Rails App

This week I did a some Linux server logrotation for a Ruby on Rails application. log/your_log.log can get large on a server with traffic, and sometimes we must control how long to retain data.

Here’s the basic configuration file I wrote, with comments:

# Logrotater:
# - Daily
# - Timestamped
# - Doesn't error on missing log files
# - Keeps seven copies
# - Truncates log files (allows Rails to start writing 
#  to the new log file without a restart)

/var/app/current/log/your_log.log {
    daily
    dateext
    missingok
    rotate 7
    copytruncate
}

There are many other options. Check out man logrotate on a Linux machine for more info.

How Rails Responds to `*/*`

Yesterday I fixed a bug in TIL. This application has a Twittercard, but it’s never worked. Twitter’s card validator confusingly claims the site lacks Twitter meta tags.

After experimenting, I realized that when cURL-ing our site, the response type is application/json. Why is Rails giving me JSON?

When an HTTP request’s accept headers equal */*, any MIME type is accepted. And, when a respond_to block is present:

Rails determines the desired response format from the HTTP Accept header submitted by the client.

Determined how? I learned that the first MIME type declared is used for */* requests.

Notice the difference (HTML first):

# app/controllers/posts_controller.rb
 def index
    @posts = Post.all
    respond_to do |format|
      format.html
      format.json { render json: @posts }
    end
  end

Request/response:

$ curl -vI localhost:3000/
...
> Accept: */*
>
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
...

JSON first:

# app/controllers/posts_controller.rb
 def index
    @posts = Post.all
    respond_to do |format|
      format.json { render json: @posts }
      format.html
    end
  end

Request/response:

$ curl -vI localhost:3000/
...
> Accept: */*
>
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Content-Type: application/json; charset=utf-8
...

Reversing the order (HTML first) solved the issue.

Deprecated Dynamic Actions

Rails routes have supported dynamic actions in the past, like this:

# config/routes.rb

 get 'ui(/:action)', controller: 'ui'

The ‘Today I Learned’ application uses code like this to create design templates.

This will be deprecated in Rails 5.1. If you want to address the change now, while still supporting a variety of routes, one solution is to name them explicitly:

# config/routes.rb

namespace 'ui' do
  %w(index edit show).each do |action|
    get action, action: action
  end
end

Break Up Lines with Splitjoin

One style-guide idea I try to maintain is sticking to a reasonable line length. 72 characters, 80 characters, whatever your preference; long lines are hard to read. They’re a code smell. They need to have a reason for existing.

A task I find myself repeating a lot to achieve this is breaking apart Ruby blocks and hashes into multiple lines, with a combination of jumping forward, entering insert mode, and hitting enter. Turning this:

FactoryGirl.create(:developer, username: 'jake_skid', superpower: 'technical writing and style-guide compliance')

into this:

FactoryGirl.create(:developer, {
  username: 'jake_skid',
  superpower: 'technical writing and style-guide compliance'
})

This task has been automated for me by the Splitjoin plugin for Vim, which is included in the Hashrocket dotfiles. Typing gS in normal mode over the first example turns it into the second example. It’s opinionated, and probably won’t satisfy every tangent of your personal style (I’d leave off the curly braces and add a trailing comma, for instance). But it’s already saved me a lot of time.

h/t Dorian Karter

Understanding Github's Language Calculations

Ever noticed this at the top of a Github repo?

This filetype percentage is calculated by Github’s Linguist project.

There’s just one problem: ‘Today I Learned’ isn’t a JavaScript project; it’s a Rails application. I would expect the majority of the files to be Ruby files. Labeling ‘Today I Learned’ a JavaScript project misrepresents it to the Github community.

I found several techniques to correct the Linguist evaluation; this pull request explains one I tried in greater detail. TL;DR – once I moved some vendored JS files into a directory with a name that Linguist ignores (ace-builds/), the calculation started to look more like a Rails app.

Here’s the updated header:

Custom Phoenix Validations

Today I learned how to write a custom Phoenix model validation. It came from the Phoenix port of this very application, which requires that posts be 200 words or less.

Phoenix doesn’t have a word length validation, so I had to make my own. Here it is, minus some irrelevant lines of code:

# web/models/post.ex

def changeset(struct, params \\ %{}) do
  struct
  |> cast(params, [:title, :body, :channel_id])
  |> validate_length_of_body
end

defp validate_length_of_body(changeset) do
  body = get_field(changeset, :body)
  validate_length_of_body(changeset, body)
end

defp validate_length_of_body(changeset, body) do
  if length(String.split(body, ~r/\s+/)) > 200 do
    add_error(changeset, :body, "should be at most 200 word(s)")
  else
    changeset
  end
end

When the post body is greater than 200 words (as defined by splitting on whitespace characters), the validation adds an error to the body field that mimics the errors Phoenix provides for character-length validation failures. Including the (s), which I kind of like.

When the body is short enough, changeset is returned from the function of the same name, a form of success.

Pattern matching FTW.

Vimscript String Coercion

An unique feature of Vimscript is coercion of strings into integers.

Here’s an example:

:echom "six" + 6
:echom "6six" + 6
:messages
6
12

Our messages show that the first string was coerced to 0 (0 + 6 = 6), and the second string was coerced to 6 (6 + 6 = 12).

Following this logic a little further, because 0 is falsey and 1 (or greater than 1) is truthy, our first string is falsey and our second string is truthy.

Spellcheck Certain Filetypes

I don’t like misspellings in my documentation, yet make a lot of them. Spelling is disabled in all my buffers by default; I turn it on when reading or editing docs. When I forget to do so, it’s easy to miss typos.

While reading Learn VimScript The Hard Way I figured out a better solution to this problem. This now lives in my ~/.vimrc.local:

augroup spellcheck_documentation
  autocmd BufNewFile,BufRead *.md setlocal spell
  autocmd BufNewFile,BufRead *.rdoc setlocal spell
augroup END

Anytime a markdown or RDoc file is created or read, I set a local configuration to turn spelling on. This has already proved invaluable after only a day or two.

Filter Your Git Diffs

Sometimes reading a git diff can be a big task. Imagine working through a big file cleanup, removing and modifing hundreds of files, and one of those modifications had an undesireable side effect. How can we filter the noise to find the problem?

git diff has a --diff-filter flag for this purpose. The specific command I used today was:

$ git diff --diff-filter=M HEAD~5 > changes.txt

This showed only modified files over the previous five commits, excluding thousands of deleted references. By directing the output to a file and visually scanning, I quickly found the problem— a forced redirect to HTTPS on the development server.

See git diff --help for more info.

Push Variables to Heroku

If you use Heroku to deploy your apps, I have a great command to try.

Included in the Heroku toolbelt command-line interface is heroku config:push.

This command pushes your local environmental variables, defaulting to a file called .env in your root directory, to any Heroku remote. It favors existing remote configs in the event of a collision.

No more copying and pasting to the command line, or pointless typos while setting remote configs.

Bonus: also check out heroku config:pull— equally useful.

Ruby Arguments Can Reference Other Arguments

I love the dark corners of Ruby. Today we discovered this one by basically guessing that it might work:

def foos(foo, bar = foo.upcase + "!")
  puts foo
  puts bar
end
2.3.1 :001 > foos('foo')
foo
FOO!
 => nil

That’s right; bar references another argument, foo. And we can also call a method on it. And concatenate it with a string, because, why not? The ‘principle of least surprise’ strikes again.

h/t Brian Dunn

Rails Database Migration Status

Wondering if you’ve run the latest database migration? Wonder no more. There are better ways to find out this information than blindly running the migrations or waiting for your app to crash.

A handy command built into Rails is rake db:migrate:status. Here’s some sample output from my blog’s development PostgreSQL database:

% rake db:migrate:status

database: worth-chicago_co_development

 Status   Migration ID    Migration Name
--------------------------------------------------
   up     20150422174456  Create developers
   up     20150422174509  Create authem sessions
   up     20150422200749  Create posts
   up     20150423152139  Add url slugs to posts
   up     20150628171109  Add constraints to posts and developers

Knowledge is power!

Append an RSpec Failure Message

Have you ever wanted to customize an RSpec failure message? It’s possible, but we lose the original message. What if we want both?

Here’s one technique:

begin
  expect(actual).to eq(expected)
rescue RSpec::Expectations::ExpectationNotMetError
  $!.message << <<-MESSAGE

You broke it.

Maybe you deleted the fixtures? Try running `rake db:create_fixtures`.
  MESSAGE
  raise
end

This rescues the failure ExpectationNotMetError, then shovels our HEREDOC string onto the message of $!, a built-in Ruby global variable representing the last error. Then, we raise.

The result is our RSpec error, with the provided message, followed by our custom text.

Vim Asterisk Search 🔎

My favorite thing about Vim is how deep it goes. I learn new things every day, even after several years of daily use. Asterisk (*) search was one such example from this week.

Typing * over any word initiates a search of the current buffer for the next instance of that word. It actually transfers the folllowing into the command bar, with word boundaries included (hovering over the word foo):

/\<foo\>

This is vanilla Vim, from the patterns library.

A Better File Wiper 📂

A tried-and-true debugging technique is to tail the test log:

$ tail -f log/test.log

When the output gets noisy, we might ‘wipe’ the log by removing it, so that it only contains the output from a single action:

$ rm log/test.log && rspec spec/features/user_logs_in_spec.rb

A better way to do this is to overwrite the file, like so:

$ echo '' > log/test.log

This wipes the file without replacing it, which preserves its serial number. It’s less destructive, and allows other processes interacting with the file to finish their work.

Here’s an example of this principle in action, using ls -i. Notice how the file’s serial number changes when we replace the file, but not when we ovewrite it.

$ ls -i *.txt
27232432 foobar.txt
$ rm foobar.txt
$ touch foobar.txt
$ ls -i *.txt
27232453 foobar.txt
$ echo '' > foobar.txt
$ ls -i *.txt
27232453 foobar.txt

h/t Brian Dunn

Rails' `Hash#except`

A cool feature provided by Rails is the #except method on Hash. This function removes a key-value pair from a hash.

Let’s remove a Rails parameter, the most obvious use case I can think of:

[1] pry(#<SessionsController>)> params
=> {"utf8"=>"✓",
 "user_login"=>{"email"=>"", "password"=>"general"},
 "controller"=>"sessions",
 "action"=>"create"}
[2] pry(#<SessionsController>)> params.except(:utf8)
=> {"user_login"=>{"email"=>"", "password"=>"general"},
 "controller"=>"sessions",
 "action"=>"create"}

And the source code:

[1] pry(#<SessionsController>)> show-source Hash#except
From: /Users/dev/.rvm/gems/ruby-2.2.5/gems/activesupport-4.2.7.1/lib/active_support/core_ext/hash/except.rb @ line 9:
Owner: Hash
Visibility: public
Number of lines: 3

def except(*keys)
  dup.except!(*keys)
end
[2] pry(#<SessionsController>)> show-source Hash#except!

From: /Users/dev/.rvm/gems/ruby-2.2.5/gems/activesupport-4.2.7.1/lib/active_support/core_ext/hash/except.rb @ line 17:
Owner: Hash
Visibility: public
Number of lines: 4

def except!(*keys)
  keys.each { |key| delete(key) }
  self
end

Thanks Rails!

Ruby $!

This week I enjoyed using Ruby’s built-in global variables, including $!. $! refers to the last error that was raised, and is useful in lots of different contexts such as Rake tasks.

Here it is in action:

:001 > begin; raise NameError; rescue; puts "The error we raised was #$!."; end
The error we raised was NameError.

And a list of these global variables:

https://github.com/ruby/ruby/blob/trunk/lib/English.rb

For a slightly less bare-metal implementation, require this library and utitlize the friendly names:

:001 > require 'english'
 => true
:002 > begin; raise NameError; rescue; puts "The error we raised was #$ERROR_INFO."; end
The error we raised was NameError.

:Gbrowse!

One of my favorite developer-to-developer communication tools is :Gbrowse, provided by vim-fugitive. This command opens your current Vim buffer, or a line or range, in the hosting provider specified by your remote. It’s irreplaceable for quickly sharing code worthy of discussion.

Take this command to the next level with :Gbrowse! which puts the URL your browser would open into your paste buffer. From there, paste away into your project management tool or chat client, getting everybody on the same (web)page.

Postgres Intersect

Today I got to see some great SQL debugging that included the use of intersect to compare two datasets.

intersect computes the set intersection of the rows returned by the involved select statements.

Here’s a simple implementation:

dev=# select generate_series(1,1000) intersect 
  select generate_series(10,15);
 generate_series
-----------------
              11
              12
              10
              15
              13
              14

Like a lot of things in Postgres, the order seems deterministic, but not predictable.

Docs

Chaining Vim Commands ⛓

You can chain Vim commands together using |. Here’s an example:

:help fugitive | resize 10

This will open the help page for Vim-Fugitive, and then resize the current window.

Here’s some real-life code I execute frequently:

:Gread | w

This empties the buffer and reads it at the last git revision, then writes the file. Very useful for rapid experimentation.

See :help :bar for more information.

Cucumber Suite Hooks

Adding hooks that run before and after your RSpec test suite looks like this:

# spec/helper/spec_helper.rb

RSpec.configure do |config|
  config.before(:suite) do
    My::Service.build!
  end

  config.after(:suite) do
    My::Service.tear_down!
  end
end

But for Cucumber, the API isn’t quite as obvious. I found some interesting discussion online about this subject, and eventually settled on the following:

# features/support/env.rb

My::Service.build!

at_exit do
  My::Service.tear_down!
end

Anything in features/support/env.rb gets run before the Cucumber test suite, so the first method call functions like a before suite block. at_exit is Ruby Kernel and runs when the program exits. This implementation works roughly the same as a before and after block.

Capitalized Letter is the Default

Today I learned something fun about command line interfaces— when presented with a list of choices such as yes, no, or quit, the capitalized choice is the default in many Unix-based CLIs.

Here’s some aptitude:

% sudo apt-get install whatever
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
The following NEW packages will be installed:
  python-cssselect python-glade2 python-pyquery
0 upgraded, 3 newly installed, 0 to remove and 43 not upgraded.
Need to get 497 kB of archives.
After this operation, 2,207 kB of additional disk space will be used.
Do you want to continue? [Y/n]

The interface waits for your Y (‘yes’) or n (‘no’).

Because ‘yes’ is capitalized, it’s the default, simply pressing ENTER is the same as pressing Y, then ENTER. Enjoy your extra keystrokes!

Commit Message Templates

We set something up on a recent project that I really liked.

In the midst of writing a bunch of tests, I realized I was starting every commit message with Test, followed by a description of the feature. Test login, Test that bots are redirected, etc. Typing the same word over and over is redundant, and it adds up quickly.

We paused and set up a commit template for the project.

Here’s the file we made (~/.git_commit_template.txt):

Test

And the command in the project directory:

$ git config commit.template "~/.git_commit_template.txt"

Our next commit message started with Test, so we just used CTRL-A to jump to the end of the sentence and start filling it in.

This does more than just save keystrokes. It reminds us that we have a format we want to stick to, and helps keep our commit message more uniform.

This could also be set globally, if you have a format you prefer to use on every project.

ExtractRspecLet

From the Hashrocket Vault…

Today I got to see the :ExtractRspecLet command from the vim-weefactor plugin. It does what the names suggests, converting this:

# spec/model/foobar_spec.rb

foo = FactoryGirl.create :foobar

To this:

# spec/model/foobar_spec.rb

let(:foo) { FactoryGirl.create :foobar }

It also moved the new let from inside my it block to right underneath my context block. Awesome!

h/t Josh Davey and Dillon Hafer

Vim Regex Word Boundaries

Today while writing a Vim regex to change every instance of it (ignoring larger matches like itemized), we stumbled upon Vim regex word boundary matching.

Given this file:

foo
foobar

The following Vim regex will match on both the first and second line:

:%s/foo/baz/g

But with word boundaries, we’ll only match (and change) the first line, because only the first foo is a standalone word:

:%s/\<foo\>/baz/g

Spellcheck Attribute

Have you ever noticed formatting like this in a text field?

The browser knows that ‘Today’ and ‘Learned’ are misspelled… but how?

The answer is the spellcheck attribute. Set it to true to enable the spellcheck magic. Right click each word for suggestions, dictionaries, etc. (Chrome).

Spellcheck is enabled by default on Chrome, but you will have to set it explicitly on some or all versions of Firefox and IE. Learn more here:

http://caniuse.com/#feat=spellcheck-attribute

Capybara Find with Wait

Integration tests covering JavaScript features are a prime location for timing-related flickers. Often our implementation and expectations are correct, but the test gives up and bails before the desired behavior can be observed.

Patience!

With Capybara, one way around this is to just wait a little longer. This code:

find('.mj-modal iframe', wait: 5)

will wait for the iframe up to five seconds, overriding Capybara’s default max wait time of two seconds. On certain test runs this can make all the difference.

Return `MatchData` with `$~`

Check out this Ruby regex:

2.1.0 :001 > "totally gourmet" =~ /totally/
 => 0

There’s a match at index zero. But what is the thing that actually matched? Enter $~:

 2.1.0 :002 > $~
  => #<MatchData "totally">

$~ stores the result of the last regex, and can be called later on. This is equivalent to the match method:

2.1.0 :003 > /totally/.match('totally gourmet')
 => #<MatchData "totally">

h/t Brian Dunn

Psql Command with Tuples Only

With psql, we can run any string command once and exit using the -c (command) flag. Here’s an example:

$ psql hr-til_development -c 'select title, slug from posts limit 5';
                  title                   |    slug
------------------------------------------+------------
 Start rails server in production mode    | 97e26f5f68
 Enable ScreenSharing from a terminal     | 55dfe1a1a3
 Variable Hoisting in JavaScript          | eeedb8dda0
 Three ways to compile Elixir             | f2a423d1e1
 Indent and de-indent line in INSERT MODE | 8de0fb5d93
(5 rows)

If you are parsing the result, the headers can get in the way. This is where the -t (tuples only) flag is useful. Same query:

$ psql hr-til_development -tc 'select title, slug from posts limit 5';
 Start rails server in production mode    | 97e26f5f68
 Enable ScreenSharing from a terminal     | 55dfe1a1a3
 Variable Hoisting in JavaScript          | eeedb8dda0
 Three ways to compile Elixir             | f2a423d1e1
 Indent and de-indent line in INSERT MODE | 8de0fb5d93

Notice the headers and row count are gone. Toggle this in a psql session with the \t command.