Author Archives: Rob Nichols

Carrierwave is a really nice gem to use when you want to upload and save a file within a ruby object. But how do you test it, if you don’t use anything more that test/unit or minitest? Most of the … Continue reading →

Using Rails Engines is a really nice way to introduce yourself to creating gems. It provides an environment to create and test code that is very similar to that used when creating a full rails app. There are couple of … Continue reading →

I’ve been installing passenger on my development PC so that I can debug an issue that is only apparent in production (it’s due to the app being hosted in a sub-uri). I don’t tend to use passenger much myself, as … Continue reading →

I’ve been digging into active_support to see how config_accessor was working. This is the code I found:       def config_accessor(*names)         options = names.extract_options!         names.each do |name|         … Continue reading →

A Rails app often has to connect to other services via an api key. For example, if you want users to be able to log in via their google credentials. One problem this raises is how to secure these api … Continue reading →

I’m currently working on a questionnaire system which has two main objects: Question and Questionnaire. I had been associating them using has_and_belongs_to_many, but a new requirement means that I now need to be able to define a question order within … Continue reading →

I’m working on an application that needs to send notifications via email, and I want to be able to test it in the development environment. In the past, I’ve either been able to set up a small Windows mail server … Continue reading →

I was chatting with a colleague who has asked me to build an app, and I was struggling to get to the root of what he wanted. After the chat, I had a little think about the problem, and realised … Continue reading →