Archive for the ‘programming’ Category

Stubbing Time.now in Ruby

Monday, February 25th, 2013

Yeah, sure, we could do that. We could also use timecop. But both solutions seems overkill when all you need is to check if some attribute got updated with the result of `Time.now`. What you should do instead, is use the power of RSpec (or rspec-expectations to be more exact):

post.published_at.should be_within(1.second).of(Time.now)

Doesn’t it look just beautiful?

Testing CSRF protection in Rails

Thursday, June 28th, 2012

Ever wanted to test your CSRF protection in a Rails app? For example, in a situation when you have a custom “remember me” cookie set and you need to overwrite Rails’ handle_unverified_request to clear it so it does not open a big security hole in your app? I know I did and it took me a while to find out how to do that, so I figured it would be good to write about it.

Here’s how to do it (in Test::Unit, but it’s the same for RSpec):

setup do
  # Enable CSRF protection in this test
  ActionController::Base.allow_forgery_protection = true
end                                                                

teardown do
  # Disable CSRF protection for all other tests
  ActionController::Base.allow_forgery_protection = false
end

Adding the above will make it so that the authenticity_token is added to each generated <form> element and will be required to be sent with each non GET request.

Uninitialized constant Gem::Deprecate

Monday, April 2nd, 2012

If you run into this problem, which by the way usually happens after upgrading the rubygems package (in my case it was to version 1.8.21), your best bet is to upgrade the gem from the backtrace of this error. In my case it was the old passenger version 3.0.9, which was causing this problem. Upgrading to 3.0.11 solved it.

In Ruby ‘?’ binds stronger than ‘or’

Thursday, October 13th, 2011

Found it the hard way.

Improper/misleading:

true or true ? "yes" : "no"
=> true

the above is basically the same as this:

true or (true ? "yes" : "no")
=> true

The proper way:

true || true ? "yes" : "no"
=> "yes"

Tell bundler to install gems globally when using capistrano

Saturday, October 8th, 2011

Seems like it’s not so straightforward. Here’s the excerpt from my config/deploy.rb:

require "bundler/capistrano"
set :bundle_dir,     ""         # install into "system" gems
set :bundle_flags,   "--quiet"  # no verbose output
set :bundle_without, []         # bundle all gems (even dev & test)

Maybe someone finds it helpful.

Painful ruby 1.9.2-p180 to 1.9.2-p290 upgrade

Saturday, October 8th, 2011

I did the recommended upgrade of my current p180 to the new p290 using rvm:

$ rvm upgrade ruby-1.9.2-p180 ruby-1.9.2-p290

First annoyance – moving gems from one gemset to the new one took over 40 minutes. Have really no idea why.

But after it was done, whenever I tried to run ‘gem’ or ‘rake’ or ‘bundle’ I got:

Invalid gemspec in [/home/jkl/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.2-p290/specifications/guard-0.8.1.gemspec]: invalid date format in specification: "2011-09-29
00:00:00.000000000Z"
Invalid gemspec in [/home/jkl/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.2-p290/specifications/json-1.6.1.gemspec]: invalid date format in specification: "2011-09-18 0
0:00:00.000000000Z"
Invalid gemspec in [/home/jkl/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.2-p290/specifications/heroku-2.8.4.gemspec]: invalid date format in specification: "2011-09-23
 00:00:00.000000000Z"
Invalid gemspec in [/home/jkl/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.2-p290/specifications/guard-0.8.4.gemspec]: invalid date format in specification: "2011-10-03
00:00:00.000000000Z"
Invalid gemspec in [/home/jkl/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.2-p290/specifications/multi_xml-0.4.0.gemspec]: invalid date format in specification: "2011-09
-06 00:00:00.000000000Z"
Invalid gemspec in [/home/jkl/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.2-p290/specifications/heroku-2.8.1.gemspec]: invalid date format in specification: "2011-09-21
 00:00:00.000000000Z"
Invalid gemspec in [/home/jkl/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.2-p290/specifications/metrical-0.0.7.gemspec]: invalid date format in specification: "2011-09-
11 00:00:00.000000000Z"
...
and so on...

The above is another manifestation of the YAML engine switch from Syck to Psych and all of the incompatibilities it has brought. The problem is that now you have to reinstall all of your gems, because all installed gems have wrong gemspec specification. D’oh.

I fixed it by running:

$ rvm gemset empty

And then bundling in each project…

$ bundle

Some more reading material.

Bug of the day

Wednesday, September 28th, 2011

Completely bad code follows, beware.

Silent error in Ruby 1.8.7:

x = [:a, :b]
=> [:a, :b]

x.slice!(:a)
=> nil

x
=> [:a, :b]

Explicit error (resulting in a failing test) in Ruby 1.9.2:

x = [:a, :b]
=> [:a, :b]

x.slice!(:a)
TypeError: can't convert Symbol into Integer

Just yet another incompatibility, but for the better!

Run guard-jasmine-headless-webkit without X server

Friday, September 9th, 2011

You write specs for your javascript, right? If not, you really should.

jasmine-headless-webkit really helps with that. guard-jasmine-headless-webkit makes it all even more enjoyable, although there’s one caveat – it’s not so easy to set it all up.

There is a great guide for that, but it lacks some important details on running guard-jasmine-headless-webkit without graphical interface (X server).

Assuming you already have Xvfb installed, execute this command to run Xvfb in the background:

Xvfb :0 -screen 0 1024x768x24 > /dev/null 2>&1 &

And then you need to setup the DISPLAY shell variable in order for guard-jasmine-headless-webkit to automatically connect to our virtual frame buffer. Here’s the excerpt from my .bash_profile (it first checks if there is Xvfb running on display :0 and only then sets the DISPLAY variable):

xdpyinfo -display :0 &>/dev/null && export DISPLAY=:0

Hash to HTML (hash2html) in Ruby

Monday, September 5th, 2011

I needed to output a Hash as a nested HTML structure. Googling didn’t find any satisfactory results, so I decided to roll my own. UL/LI tags seemed like the best choice. It was a nice exercise in recursion.

The result is a function, which outputs a nicely indented HTML. Note, however, that it’s a very basic solution. It doesn’t cope well with anything other than Strings and Numbers (unless your objects support a nice to_s method).

# Prints nested Hash as a nested <ul> and <li> tags
# - keys are wrapped in <strong> tags
# - values are wrapped in <span> tags
def HashToHTML(hash, opts = {})
  return if !hash.is_a?(Hash)

  indent_level = opts.fetch(:indent_level) { 0 }

  out = " " * indent_level + "<ul>\n"

  hash.each do |key, value|
    out += " " * (indent_level + 2) + "<li><strong>#{key}:</strong>"

    if value.is_a?(Hash)
      out += "\n" + HashToHTML(value, :indent_level => indent_level + 2) + " " * (indent_level + 2) + "</li>\n"
    else
      out += " <span>#{value}</span></li>\n"
    end
  end

  out += " " * indent_level + "</ul>\n"
end

Who knows, maybe someone somewhere finds it useful.

Update: much more concise solution by Piotr Szotkowski.

My first pull request to a public project has been accepted

Wednesday, August 31st, 2011

It was a small but important patch to the i18n gem‘s pluralization rules for the Polish language.

Really made my day. Thanks Krzysztof!