Honeybadger deployment tracking for Rails with Kamal and Doppler

I recently signed up for Honeybadger to help with monitoring and error tracking for my Rails app. It’s easy to set up (just add a gem!) and they have a great free tier for small projects. Besides error tracking, Honeybadger also offers a simple way to track each time you deploy a new version of your app.

This post explains how to set up the deployment tracking specifically for a Rails app that uses Kamal for deploying and Doppler for secret management (if you need help setting up Doppler with Kamal, see my previous post). After signing up for and installing Honybadger, there are only two steps:

Add your Honeybadger API key to your Doppler project
Set up a Kamal post-deploy hook to send a deploy notification to Honeybadger

Setting up a Rails 8 + Kamal app with Doppler Secrets

I recently started working on a new personal Rails project and was eager to try out Kamal and a secret manager called Doppler. I heard about Doppler on one of the Rails-related podcasts and loved what they had to say. I decided to use it with my app so that all my secrets would be centralized, easier to manage, and there would less risk of accidentally committing something to Github.

Doppler’s CLI tool also lets you run commands with secrets injected directly from your secret store so that they won’t show up in the shell history. They have a generous free tier, as well!

Best of all, Kamal provides an adapter for Doppler so that you can easily read your secrets directly into the .kamal/secrets file and inject them into your app as ENV variables. Below I’ll explain how I got everything set up for development and production. I'm also planning to write another post on how I set up my app to deploy using Kamal soon.

Understanding Rails Polymorphic Associations: A Case Study

I recently got to implement a polymorphic table in Rails at work. I’ve read about polymorphism a few times in books or blogs, but I never quite understood it. Having a real-life situation to apply the concept to at work, along with some conversations with my team’s lead engineer finally made it click!

A lot of the examples in other articles and in even in the documentation are somewhat contrived, so I’d like to share what I did on the job as a real-world mini case study in hopes that this helps someone else.

Sidekiq’s sidekiq_retries_exhausted hook

sidekiq_retries_exhausted is a Sidekiq hook that you can use to do something after Sidekiq has used up all of its retries but the job still failed. It’s a good way to make sure you send a failure notification or log an error that might be causing the job to fail instead of it just failing silently.

In the worker, you can set a specific number of retries if you want with sidekiq_options retry: <some_number>. The default is 25 times.

Stopping a Webcam with JavaScript

I recently had to manually get a running web camera to turn off using JavaScript for a project at work.

I had a hard time figuring out JavaScript’s MediaStream API so here are some quick notes on how I got the camera to stop.

QR Code Reader on Rails

Intro and getting started

I recently had to implement a QR code reader in Rails at work and in this article, I’ll take you through how I did it by creating a demo featuring two different ways of handling scanned QR codes: One simply scans a QR code and displays the scanned data on the screen and the other sends the QR data to a Rails controller for processing.

Let’s get started right away! We’ll do so by creating a new Rails project:

rails new qr-code-reader-demo

Next, we’ll install a JavaScript library that will allow us to scan QR codes with a video camera on a phone or computer.

Adding Custom JavaScript in Rails 6

In Rails 6, JavaScript assets are no longer included with the app/assets/ directory and instead have been moved into a separate directory app/javascript handled by Webpacker. That’s great, but when I wanted to add some custom javascript of my own, there wasn’t any clear documentation that described how it should be done.

Dynamic method handling with #method_missing and #respond_to_missing? in Ruby and Rails

I just finished reading “The Well-Grounded Rubyist” and finally learned about the mysterious #method_missing method.

#method_missing gets called whenever an object receives a method call that it doesn’t know how to handle. Maybe it was never defined, misspelled, or for some reason, ruby can’t find it on the object’s method look-up path.

Useful Git Commands For Removing Accidentally Pushed or Committed Files

I find myself needing to reset commits often because I committed a file I didn’t want to or forgot to add something to a commit. Every once in a while, I also need to remove the file from the remote repository (but not locally) because I accidentally pushed it. I always forget the commands, so here they are for everyone’s reference :)

Handy Git Shortcuts (Aliases) and How to Set Them Up

If you’re using git, these handy short codes will speed up your workflow. The following are the basic abbreviated git commands that are recommended on the git website. I’m always forgetting how to do this when I need to set up git on new computer so posting this as a reference.

co for checkout
br for branch
ci for commit
st for status

Adding reCaptcha v3 to a Rails app without a gem

This article goes over how you can add Google reCaptcha v3 to a Rails app and use it to verify a form submission.

I couldn’t find any other how-to articles in English on how to specifically add the new v3 to Rails except for using gems. This is a DIY explanation on how you can do it without using a gem.

Debugging Google Cloud Storage CORS errors in Rails 6 Action Text (direct upload of images)

I recently tried out using Rails 6’s new Action Text feature for a simple blog page. One thing I like is about it is how it lets you drag and drop in multiple images and then automatically places them into a nicely formatted “gallery” layout.

When images are placed into the Action Text editor, it performs a direct upload of each image into your storage location via JavaScript. Depending on what you are using for image storage, you may run into some problems caused by CORS (Cross-origin resource sharing) errors.

Sending Emails in Rails with Action Mailer and Gmail

In this post, I will be setting up a mailer in Rails that will send out an email to the website owner when a customer submits an order. (I was using Rails 6 but this should also work in Rails 5).

The steps:

Set up a mailer with rails generate mailer
Create email templates (views)
Tell the appropriate controller action to send the email
Set up an email previewer
Configure the mail settings for Gmail.
Set up tests

I18n for Rails: Set-up for Using Locales from URL Params and Basic I18n Usage

Setting up I18n for Ruby/Rails apps is fairly simple, but as a beginner, I often run into some hiccups with the configuration (and trying to decipher what exactly is being said in the Rails Guides and other people’s blogs). As a reference for myself and hopefully other developers who are just starting out, I’m going to document the steps I take for using I18n in my apps.