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Tag: rails

Using HTTPS Locally: Pow, SSL, Rails, and Apache

Using HTTPS local development or testing environments is a hassle. A common practice is to disable SSL in development, but I’ve had too many cases of minor bugs creeping in when routing works differently between environments. I also don’t like manually having to let my browsers know that a self-signed certificate is valid. Here’s the configuration that I use to easily add https support on my development machine to any application served—or proxied—through port 80. Pow I use Pow as my development rails server. However, because I often work with other languages as well, I run Apache (you could just as easily use nginx) and reverse proxy Rails application requests to Pow. To do this, you’ll need Pow to bind to a port that is not port 80…

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Multi-Engine Rails 3.2 Testing Tips & Tricks, Part 3

This is a continuation of my second post on setting up a CI server for a multi-engine rails 3.2 application. Use `Pry.rescue {}` For Dynamic `binding.pry` Getting access to an interactive REPL is essential when debugging a web application. Better Errors does a great job when when interacting with the app directly (in rails4 this functionality comes built in). binding.pry is a great tool when interacting with your code directly in your development or testing environment. However, there are some cases where adding binding pry to just the right place is either painful or would require you to modify a external gem. An easy way to get around this is to use pry-rescue which will open a pry REPL wherever an exception occurs…

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Setting up CI for a Multi-Engine Rails 3.2 Application

I recently setup continuous integration (via CircleCI, which I’m really impressed with). It ended up being a bit more tricky for a couple of reasons: I needed to pull semi-static seed data into the application. For this app, this was product data that isn’t changed often and is pulled from an external system. I wanted to use seed data from the production database because the integrity of the data in the external DB couldn’t be trusted and I wanted to ensure that if the tests passed it was a real representation of if the app would function in the live environment. There were a number of custom rails engines that app was compromised of. Each of these engines had separate unit tests, but not separate integration (feature) tests…

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