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

Git Log Formatting

The git log command is great and has tons of good information, but the output doesn't give you that nice 'overview' of the commit history, too much detail on too many lines

I've been using the following in my .gitconfig file

l = log -20 --format='%h %ad %d %an: %s' --date=short

typing 'git l' renders the following output:

Last night I watched the Destroy All Software "PRETTY GIT LOGS" screencast which takes 'git l' to the next level

• https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/screencasts/catalog/pretty-git-logs
• https://github.com/garybernhardt/dotfiles/blob/master/.gitconfig
• https://github.com/garybernhardt/dotfiles/blob/master/.githelpers

now 'git l' renders

   

Helper script to delete git tags locally and remote

Might be useful to others, delete a bunch of git tags - remote and locally



Resources

• http://nathanhoad.net/how-to-delete-a-remote-git-tag 
• http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/programming-9/bash-read-every-line-in-the-files-and-use-the-line-as-parameters-as-another-program-246291/
• http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1605232/use-bash-to-read-a-file-and-then-execute-a-command-from-the-words-extracted

414 Request-URI Too Large

How to configure nginx to accept larger querystring requests

Increase the 'large_client_header_buffers'

This is located in the 'http' section of the configuration

Example:

    http {
            # override to allow long query string
            large_client_header_buffers 8 512k;
         
            ...
    }

Resources

• http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1067334/how-to-set-the-allowed-url-length-for-a-nginx-request-error-code-414-uri-too 
• http://nginx.2469901.n2.nabble.com/Nginx-returning-414-even-when-large-client-header-buffers-is-set-td7451517.html
• http://wiki.nginx.org/NginxHttpCoreModule#large_client_header_buffers 

Unofficial Twitter Bootstrap Documentation

Unofficial Twitter Bootstrap Documentation
http://unofficial-twitter-bootstrap-documentation.com/

The current project I am working on is running bootstrap 2.0.2 and after the release of 2.1.0 the online documentation for 2.0.x was gone.

I went ahead and compiled the archive docs from the bootstrap github repo into a single site - hopefully others find it useful.

Rails - ActiveRecord created_by and updated_by gem

Often your application will want to track who created and updated your data.
On a previous rails 2 project I used a plugin called userstamp which worked well, but until recently it did not support rails 3+

I didn't find any other gems out there at the time, so I put together the clerk gem,
you can install it as a gem in your rails 3+ applications by adding gem 'clerk' to your Gemfile, see the README on github for details

NOTE: the current version relies on your database tables having columns named created_by_id and updated_by_id and the gem does not support any custom configuration.

• https://github.com/house9/clerk
• http://rubygems.org/gems/clerk