Helping web developers and operations bridge the deployment gap
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Throughout the last couple of days, I did a bigger refactoring of our Ruby on Rails application. As I changed quite a few moving parts, I covered everything I did with RSpec. It’s really an incredible feeling to have all your bases covered with automated tests when you finally start the manual regression test. Along [...]
When you do integration testing in a ruby on rails application, you don’t want to stub out all involved models. Rails’ built in approach of using fixtures is considered to be sub-optimal and the way to go today is to use factories.
For developing our Ruby on Rails based web site, we usually take regular SQL dumps from our production servers (of course, anonymizing sensitive customer data along the way). Always having a fresh dump allows us to be on the safe side when writing database migrations. Having an up to date development database enables us to [...]
Recently, I was looking deeper into how we could add some automated acceptance tests to our Ruby on Rails based website. We’re using RSpec since quite a while now for TDD, but doing some high level acceptance tests was not on our agenda so far.
DRY Cucumber Scenarios
The new cool kid on the block is Cucumber. [...]
To run automated tests for your Ruby on Rails webapp, not only do you need your latest database structure deployed to the test database (created by rake db:test:prepare), but you also need some seed data for lookup tables, e.g. like zip codes.
Common approaches like adding seed data through rails migrations are discouraged, and plugins like [...]
In my post about Carpet is a re-mix of existing configuration management solutions, I gave you a rough overview of the problems I tried to address with Carpet. In this article, I want to show you how you can set up a complete Ruby on Rails stack with only a few lines of configuration while [...]
As you might have already guessed, I’m constantly striving for the simplest yet most optimal process for running both an agile development team and agile web operations. People come first, then the procedures followed by the people and finally, the tools those people use.
Since tools supporting the agile development process have the lowest priority for [...]
When upgrading our application from Ruby on Rails 1.2.6 to Rails 2.1 we experienced some issues with the GLoc localization library.
First, we got exceptions like this one:
ActionView::TemplateError (wrong number of arguments (3 for 2))
Thanks to this Rails 2.1 patch for GLoc, we were able to run our application again.
But then we noticed the application [...]
