What tools do I use as a Rails developer?

1. My Ruby (and Rails)
environment
Reuven M. Lerner • reuven@lerner.co.il
Rails Underground, Israel • July 13th, 2011

2. Who am I?
• Web developer, software architect,
consultant, lecturer/trainer
• Linux Journal columnist since 1996
• Mostly Ruby on Rails + PostgreSQL, but
also Python, PHP, jQuery, and lots more...

3. Want to learn Rails?
• I’m teaching a course at Hi-Tech College
• Not very far from here!
• August 14 - 18 , 2011
th th
• (I can do private training as well...)

4. Also:
• I’m swamped with Ruby work!
• Want to help me out?
• (I need to sleep!)
• Come speak with me after my talk...

5. Tools are important

6. Shell
• For years, I used bash
• GNU Bourne-Again Shell
• I recently switched to zsh
• I use the plugin, “oh my zsh”
• Did it change my life? No.
• But some things are easier

7. Better things
• Easy-to-customize prompt
• Saner history (across terminal tabs)
• Automatic updates of oh-my-zsh
• One configuration file (.zshrc)

8. Things I use often
• C-z (suspend) and fg
• Emacs keybinding
• C-r (reverse search
• Customized prompt

9. iTerm2
• The OS X terminal is OK
• iTerm used to be much better
• Recently rewritten as iTerm2
• I use very few of the features
• Lots of tabs, though!
• My favorites: Search, movie playback

10. rvm
• Don’t develop in Ruby without rvm
• Really, it’s amazing
• I use 1.8.7, 1.9.2, and JRuby day to day
• Learn about updates!
• .rvmrc for each project I work on
• Gemsets vs. bundles — bundles are winning

11. irb
• I use irb (or the Rails console) every day
• If you’re programming in Ruby, then you
should probably have IRB open always!
• Every piece of code I write, more or less, is
tried in IRB first
• Debugging largely happens for me in IRB

12. Gems for IRB!
• There has been an explosion of IRB-
enhancing gems
• I’ll present some of them
• Most or all of these are from the “irbtools”
gem, which packages them together

13. ap
• “Awesome print” — and it is!
• Data structures look nicer, in color

14. Sorted methods!
• How often do you write
foo.methods.sort
• Now you can just write
foo.methods

15. every_day_irb
• Puts shell commands in IRB!
ls
cat
pwd

16. ;nil after long evals
• Cute trick: If you’re reading a lot of data, add
;nil
• to the end of your command, so that IRB
won’t print it all.

17. hirb
• Shows data in a table
• Sort of like ap, but for to_s
• Better with ActiveRecord output
• If you want to disable it (I do by default),
just set Hirb::View.disable, or
Hirb::View.enable

18. methodfinder
• Methodfinder.find
• Object#find_method
"abc".find_method("ABC")

19. sketch
• Anonymous edits
• Named edits
• Great with emacsclient (for Emacs users)
sketch
sketch :foo

20. GNU Emacs
• One True Editor
• I’ve used it since 1988 (yes, 1988!)
• More operating system than editor
• Configure it in Emacs Lisp
• Full, Turing-complete language with
oodles of functions for text, files,
networks, and psychoanalysis

21. Ideal Emacs keyboard

22. Required anti-vi joke
Subject: Re: HELP: music for cl, vi, vlc, pi
Date: 14 May 1996 10:35:43 +0200
Alan> vi doesn't play music.
David> Sure it does.
In fact, vi has a special mode just for music. If you
are not in insert mode, you are in `beep' mode:
whatever you press produces a beep. In the best
tradition of vi, there is of course just one note
(you know: small is beautiful) but this is just one
of those reasons why vi hackers love vi.

23. How Emacs works

24. How Emacs works
Lisp
function

25. How Emacs works
Lisp
Key binding
function

26. How Emacs works
Lisp
Keystroke Key binding
function

27. Sounds crazy?
• It’s great.
• Define functions. Or install packages.
• Set bindings (global or modal).
• Use control-alt-shift-meta-cokebottle

28. Function, binding
(defun indent-buffer (&optional which-buffer)
"Indents a buffer (default is current)."
(interactive "bBuffer to indent: ")
(indent-region (point-min) (point-max) nil)
(beep)
(message "Done indenting"))
(global-set-key "ei" 'indent-buffer)

29. (add-hook 'ruby-mode-hook
'(lambda ()
(interactive)
(inf-ruby-keys)
(rainbow-delimiters-mode t)
(turn-on-font-lock)
(ruby-electric-mode t)
(rvm-activate-corresponding-ruby)
(if (and (not (null buffer-file-name))
(file-writable-p buffer-file-name)
(not (string-match "jruby" rvm--
current-ruby-binary-path)))
(flymake-mode))
))

30. Snippets
• TextMate fans, rejoice — Emacs has
snippets, too!
• It has had “abbrevs” forever
• Even import TextMate snippets
• I don’t use these that much, to be honest

31. Intellisense?
• Everyone in Israel asks about it!
• Emacs has a few options that come close
• I’ve used it on a few occasions, but never
really liked it

32. Flymake
• Check your syntax (with a background
Ruby process) as you type!
• Errors? The line appears in red

33. Ruby electric mode
• Inserts extra quotes, braces,
• Also inserts “end” after class, module, if,
etc.

34. Rainbow delimiters
• Fancy braces!
• Each set of parens/braces gets its own
color
• Lovely when you have a hash

35. Rinari
• Rinari Is Not A Rails IDE
• Keyboard shortcuts to jump to related
parts of the code
• Tries to be minimal
• There’s also emacs-rails — more
functionality, but updated less frequently

36. ERb and Haml
• Handles colorizing, indenting
• Flymake works inside of ERb, also!

37. Switching buffers
• From controllers (C-c ‘ f c) — functional
tests (C-c ‘ f t)
• Models (C-c ‘ f m) — unit tests (or C-c ‘ f t)
• Switch to the log (C-c ‘ f o)

38. Tags
• Index of names in your files
• Jump to the right file/line
• Even search/replace
• I go back and forth on using tags ... they
work really well, but I’m often too lazy, and
end up using “git grep”

39. Emacs server
• If you’re starting Emacs more than once a
day, then you’re doing something wrong
• Open buffers
• Connect from outside
• e.g., sketch (from before, in IRB)

40. Magit
• Use Git from within Emacs!
• Stage, Commit, Stash
• Branch, Merge
• Push, pull
• Fully integrated, and works really nicely

42. Macros
• Record a macro
• Replay any number of times
• Super-duper useful, especially when
converting files

43. Firefox plugins
• I use Firefox as my main browser
• Not the fastest (for now!)
• Not updated like Chrome (for now!)
• But it has excellent plugins

44. Firebug
• Everyone’s favorite JavaScript/Ajax
debugger
• Console
• Execute JavaScript
• Modify CSS in real time
• Truly an amazing piece of software

45. Web developer
• “View Generated HTML” — my favorite!
• Also:View HTTP request, response headers
• Mark items with boxes

46. Growl
• Notification system under OS X
• Autotest + Growl gives me nice output for
red/green
• Just require “autotest/growl” in your
~/.autotest file

47. Pow
• Finally, I have to run things locally
• 37signals recently released Pow for OS X
• (There’s talk of doing it for Linux, too)
• Super-duper easy:
• symlink from ~/.pow/foo to project foo
• Now go to http://foo.dev !

48. Thanks!
(Any questions?)
reuven@lerner.co.il
http://www.lerner.co.il/
054-496-8405
“reuvenlerner” on Skype/AIM