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> random tricks you can do with Rails

There are bunch of really good nuggets in this presentation:

• http://www.confreaks.com/videos/889-railsconf2012-ten-things-you-didn-t-know-rails-could-do 
• https://speakerdeck.com/jeg2/10-things-you-didnt-know-rails-could-do

Ruby on Rails continuous integration (CI) with Jenkins the easy way with Chef and Knife

Do you need a CI build setup for your Ruby on Rails app?

Here are some chef / knife solo scripts that will deploy a Jenkins server to run your CI build - you could be up and running in less than 1/2 an hour

https://github.com/house9/ci_chef_jenkins_rails

Check out the README for details

rails :remote => true jQuery events

I constantly find myself looking these up, saving this link for future reference

https://github.com/rails/jquery-ujs/wiki/ajax

contains all of the rails custom jQuery events for remote forms, such as "ajax:success", "ajax:before"; also includes the method signatures.

Sending email with Rails Mailers, The Random bits...

See the rails guides and railscasts for getting started with Rails Mailers; 
this article includes some additional information on Rails Mailers not included in those articles.

RailsCasts: http://railscasts.com/episodes/206-action-mailer-in-rails-3
Rails Guides: "Action Mailer Basics" on the rails guides - The guide covers all of the common mailer tasks

• setup and configuration
• attachments
• layouts

Random Bits

These examples were created using rails 3.2

Add importance headers

NOTE: many email clients will ignore these headers

Add receipt header

NOTE: many email clients will ignore these headers

Testing mailer headers with rspec

If you have rspec-rails gem installed with your rails application then running the generator will stub out most of your mailer tests, including a fixture file for the mailer view, which you may or may not want to remove.

NOTE: test against mail.header, not mail.headers

Use a different layout for some Mailer actions

our default layout is the customer facing one but we want to override it in some cases

Setting up a C.I. build (Continuous Integration) for a Ruby on Rails application

It has never been easier than with Semaphore - Hosted Continuous Integration

• https://semaphoreapp.com/

How easy is it

• add semaphore ssh key to your github repo
• then semaphore automatically determines your ruby version, database, etc...
• you can tweak the build steps later, the defaults are pretty good

It will automatically detect new branches!!! That means zero setup when the new branch is added

It is not cheap, for personal side projects it might not make sense?
But well worth the money if you are doing paid development