GoRails

Black Friday 2025 Sale

Thu, 13 Nov 2025 11:24:10 -0600

I've been a bit quiet the last few months since we had our second baby on the way. Everyone's happy and healthy and I've been enjoying some time off with the family. 👨‍🍼

I wanted to share our Black Friday deals early this year since I've got my hands full with the new baby.

Here's what's on sale for 2025:

24% off the GoRails yearly plan (Normally $190/year)

Stay up to date with Rails 8.1, Hotwire, and more with a GoRails subscription. This works out to only $12/mo to master Ruby on Rails which is a great deal!

$50 off the Learn Hotwire course

Early this year, we launched the Learn Hotwire course and it got some incredible feedback. It's the most comprehensive and up-to-date course on Hotwire and explains how many of Hotwire's features work from scratch with plain JavaScript.

The Learn Hotwire course goes up in price after Cyber Monday, so be sure to snag a copy today. If you want to buy licensese for your team, send me an email!

$50 off Jumpstart Pro Rails, iOS and Android

The Jumpstart Pro templates are perfect if you've got an idea or product you want to build. You can focus on building and getting your idea into users' hands as fast as possible.

It runs Ruby 3 and Rails 8.1, Hotwire, Stripe, and has a built-in admin interface, API, payments, teams, webhooks, API clients, and a whole slew of functionality to save you time.

In fact, all of our products like GoRails https://gorails.com and Hatchbox.io https://hatchbox.io run on Jumpstart Pro Rails. Since we use it every day, it's a great, battle-tested template to learn from and use as a foundation.

$50 off the Advanced Ruby: Behind the Magic course

The Advanced Ruby course explains everything I wish I knew when I was starting my career as a Ruby on Rails developer. I struggled with learning Ruby itself because I jumped straight into the deep end with Rails. This course explains how Rails takes advantage of Ruby with DSLs, methods, classes, metaprogramming and much more. After this course, you'll have a strong understanding of how to use Ruby to build elegant software.

$50 off the Payments with Rails Master Class

Payments have gotten very tricky to implement over the years. This course walks through accepting payments with Stripe, supporting Strong Customer Authentication, webhooks, and more.

$50 off the Refactoring Rails course

Ben Orenstein's Refactoring Rails course is one I refer back to several times a year. It's a great set of strategies for cleaning up and better organizing your code. Highly recommend it if you want to get better at refactoring code and tests.

$50 off SellRepo

SellRepo is a self-hosted, one-time purchase app (like ONCE apps) to help you sell source code. Deploy it to your server then connect your GitHub repository and Stripe account and start selling!

Use 7LGYNCWI at checkout to get $50 off SellRepo!

Phew, that's a lot of things! If you have any questions, let me know.

PostgreSQL 17 cluster config missing after upgrade on Ubuntu

Wed, 26 Feb 2025 16:37:05 -0600

If you've been running PostgreSQL on your server for a while, you've been used to new versions automatically creating a default cluster.

When you install Postgres 16 after say Postgres 15, you'll see that it creates /etc/postgresql/16/main/postgresql.conf and all the other configuration files alongside /etc/postgresql/15/main/. Each version gets it's own default main cluster after installation.

But if you're using the official Postgres APT repository on Ubuntu or Debian, you may notice Postgres 17 does not do this. After installing Postgres 17, the /etc/postgresql/17 directory is missing entirely. If you're looking for /etc/postgresql/17/main/postgresql.conf you won't find it.

Why? The PostgreSQL Debian package's postinstall script has been changed to detect existing clusters and skip creation of a new main cluster if another cluster exists.

Presumably, this is to help make the upgrade process simpler. If you already have Postgres 16 or lower installed, chances are you'll want to upgrade the cluster to run on Postgres 17. With this change, you no longer have to remove or rename the default main cluster for the new Postgres version during the upgrade process.

But if you do want to create a default main cluster for Postgres 17, you will need to run:

$ pg_createcluster -u postgres --no-status 17 main

This is the same command the postgresql-17 package would run during install if no other Postgres clusters exist. You can see the new cluster by running pg_lsclusters

$ sudo pg_lsclusters 
Ver Cluster Port Status Owner Data directory Log file 
16 main 5432 online postgres /var/lib/postgresql/16/main /var/log/postgresql/postgresql-16-main.log 
17 main 5433 down postgres /var/lib/postgresql/17/main /var/log/postgresql/postgresql-17-main.log

To start the new Postgres 17 cluster, you can run:

$ sudo service postgresql start

You can then see that both clusters are running:

$ sudo pg_lsclusters 
Ver Cluster Port Status Owner Data directory Log file 
16 main 5432 online postgres /var/lib/postgresql/16/main /var/log/postgresql/postgresql-16-main.log 
17 main 5433 online postgres /var/lib/postgresql/17/main /var/log/postgresql/postgresql-17-main.log

If you're curious about upgrading Postgres versions on Ubuntu server, take a look at our guide Upgrading PostgreSQL version on Ubuntu Server

Black Friday 2024 - Sales on GoRails, Courses, Jumpstart, SellRepo! 🎉

Mon, 25 Nov 2024 09:24:58 -0600

Black Friday sales are a way for us to say thanks for all your support. We wouldn't be here without you! 💖

Our Black Friday 2024 sales

36% off GoRails with the yearly plan - Get the deal

Get a yearly subscription to GoRails for just $144/year. That's only $12/mo to stay up-to-date with Hotwire, Rails 7, Ruby 3, and much more!

Want to buy someone a GoRails subscription?

Buy a gift subscription for GoRails and we'll add the subscription to their account for you.

You can also send us a message with the name and email of the recipient and how many months you'd like to gift them. We'll send you an invoice and once it's paid we'll invite them to their account.

$50+ off Jumpstart Pro (Rails, iOS & Android) - Get the deal

Choose either the Rails, iOS, or Android template and get $50 off a single site license or $150 off an unlimited license.

If you're interested in building a product with Ruby on Rails, Jumpstart Pro is the perfect place to get started. We'll take care of all the ground work so you can focus on building your business. Start with Rails and when you're ready, you can expand to iOS and Android apps, or snag them now while they're on sale!

We built Hatchbox.io using Jumpstart Pro and you can check out lots of other Jumpstart Pro examples that our customers have turned into life changing businesses.

iOS and Android are being updated to the brand new Hotwire Native library to take advantage of all the new goodies. We've been able to simplify a LOT of code with this upgrade too.

This is wild.

@masilotti.com shaved off 6,000 lines of Swift code upgrading @jumpstartrails.com iOS to Hotwire Native.

Jumpstart Pro Rails, iOS and Android go on sale next week for Black Friday, so keep an eye out if you want to grab a copy and turn your Rails apps into native apps!

[image or embed]
— Chris Oliver (@excid3.com) November 23, 2024 at 8:27 AM

$50 off Advanced Ruby: Behind the Magic - Get the deal

This course is everything I wish I knew about Ruby when I started as a Rails developer. We cover 6+ hours of Ruby techniques used in Rails and other Rubygems to see how they work from scratch.

$50 off Refactoring Rails - Get the deal

Ben Orenstein's Refactoring Rails course is one I refer back to several times a year. It's a great set of strategies for cleaning up and better organizing your code.

$50 off Payments with Ruby on Rails Master Class - Get the deal

Want to add Payments to your Rails app? It's gotten much trickier over the past years. This course walks you through accepting Payments with Stripe that are compatible with Strong Customer Authentication, webhooks, and more.

$50 off SellRepo - Get the deal

Want to start your own business? SellRepo helps you sell source code in GitHub repositories to your audience. It is a one-time purchase so you can experiment with product ideas constantly paying fees to other platforms. You'll also get lifetime updates included. Get $50 off through Cyber Monday!

If you have any questions, hit reply and let us know. 👋

How to Extend the Ubuntu Default Logical Volume Partition

Tue, 09 Jul 2024 10:03:18 -0500

Using VirtualBox, I'll often give Ubuntu a certain disk size and only realize later on that it isn't using the full partition size for the disk.

Run these commands to extend the root filesystem to use the full disk:

lvextend -l +100%FREE /dev/ubuntu-vg/ubuntu-lv
resize2fs /dev/mapper/ubuntu–vg-ubuntu–lv
df -h

For more details, see: https://packetpushers.net/blog/ubuntu-extend-your-default-lvm-space/

Black Friday Sale 2023!

Wed, 22 Nov 2023 07:06:11 -0600

It's hard to believe it's holiday season already and 2023 is almost over. Our Black Friday sale is live and we do this every year as a way to show our appreciation for all the support the Ruby on Rails community has given us over the years. We've grown from a 1 person company to 3 to continue growing and supporting the Ruby on Rails community. Kent, Collin, and I want to say thanks for all your support that makes this possible and we promise to continue creating the best Rails education and tools we can.

Here are the Black Friday sales for 2023:

36% off GoRails with the yearly plan - Get the deal

Get a yearly subscription to GoRails for just $144/year. That's only $12/mo to stay up-to-date with Hotwire, Rails 7, Ruby 3, and much more!

Gifting GoRails

Want to send someone the gift of GoRails? Send us a message with the name and email of the recipient and how many months you'd like to gift them. We'll send you an invoice and once it's paid we'll invite them to their account.

$50+ off Jumpstart Pro (Rails, iOS & Android) - Get the deal

Choose either the Rails, iOS, or Android template and get $50 off a single site license or $150 off an unlimited license.

We built Hatchbox.io using Jumpstart Pro and you can check out lots of other Jumpstart Pro examples that our customers have turned into life changing businesses.

This is the time we've ever run a sale on Jumpstart Pro Android, so now is a great time to snag a copy if you've been waiting.

$50 off Advanced Ruby: Behind the Magic - Get the deal

This course is everything I wish I knew about Ruby when I started as a Rails developer. We cover 6+ hours of Ruby techniques used in Rails and other Rubygems to see how they work from scratch.

$50 off Refactoring Rails - Get the deal

Ben Orenstein's Refactoring Rails course is one I refer back to several times a year. It's a great set of strategies for cleaning up and better organizing your code.

$50 off Payments with Ruby on Rails Master Class - Get the deal

If you have any questions, hit reply and let us know. 👋

Rails World 2023: Powerful Rails Features You Might Not Know Talk Slides

Tue, 10 Oct 2023 09:01:44 -0500

I gave a talk at Rails World 2023 in Amsterdam on Powerful Rails Features You Might Not Know.

If all you've got is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. In tech, there is a constant stream of new features being added every day. Keeping up with the latest Ruby on Rails functionality can help you and your team be far more productive than you might normally be.

In this talk, we walk through a bunch of lesser known or easy to miss features in Ruby on Rails that you can use to improve your skills.

And here are the slides to follow along with:

Patching Models for Ransack 4.0.0: Extending ActiveRecord for Gem Compatibility

Tue, 22 Aug 2023 19:50:11 -0500

Here at GoRails, we are running ActiveAdmin to power our administration area and we recently upgraded the version which we were running to version 3.0.0. The ActiveAdmin engine has a dependency on Ransack and along with upgrading to the latest version of ActiveAdmin that brought along an upgrade of Ransack to version 4.0.0.

Going up a major version usually introduces breaking changes and sure enough this was our experience.

As noted in the Ransack CHANGELOG for the version 4.0.0 release there is indeed a breaking change introduced:

Require explicit allowlisting of attributes and associations

So with this change indicating that we needed to explicitly denote which attributes and associations we want to allow ransack to search the thought process started. Previously, we had the ability to search all attributes of the models we pull into our admin area so while Ransack provided helpful error messages of how to implement the needed methods to explicitly list the attributes, we wanted to continue to retain the ability to search all attributes/associations used in the admin area. So what now?

Initially, my approach was to create a module which I could extend on the necessary models which would implement the two methods noted in the Ransack error message in the browser while running in development. The body of the methods would return an array of the attributes and associations for each model leverage some Rails methods to achieve this result. An example (but not exact) implementation of this can be seen below:

module RansackSearchable
  def ransackable_attributes(auth_object = nil)
    attribute_names
  end

  def ransackable_associations(auth_object = nil)
    reflect_on_all_associations.map { |assoc| assoc.name.to_s }
  end
end

The initial implementation did resolve a lot of the issues encountered in most of the admin panels for most models... but not all.

The next issue was the fact that in our admin area we manage our tags (via ActsAsTaggableOn) for resources like this blog post, our series, and more. Additionally, We have an admin section for the Ahoy gem. These gems also needed to be extended with the above module. But how would we achieve this without re-opening the various class/modules?

The first thought was to switch from extending the module on the models used in the admin area and instead extend ApplicationRecord itself in the hopes of extending the ActsAsTaggableOn and Ahoy gems in the process.

Unfortunately, this didn't work as expected. After diving into the source code for the two gems, it turns out the reason this didn't happen as expected is because the ActsAsTaggableOn and Ahoy gems (engines/plugins) don't inherit from ApplicationRecord but instead they inherit from ActiveRecord::Base. So with this knowledge in place it was back to the drawing board.

Before taking another pass at implementing a fix, I decided to stop by the ActiveAdmin repository to check the issues and discussions to see if there was any talk of this issue. Sure enough, there was a great discussion that also had a some insight into some methods available from Ransack to grab the attribute names and associations in a cleaner way.

Now it was all starting to come together nicely, but there was still the issue of how to patch the gems.

Knowing that we needed to drop down a level from ApplicationRecord and instead extend ActiveRecord::Base I started to think about where a good place would be do the extending. Thinking about this more, it seemed that we would want to extend ActiveRecord::Base once it is loaded in our Rails application, that way the module code will be placed in the inheritance hierarchy. So creating an initializer to do this seemed like an ideal place for the code.

Since the module consisted of only two methods, I ultimately decided to define the module in the opening line of the initializer and then outside the module definition, and then setup an on_load hook for :active_record and inside the block passed to the hook, perform the extending.

Below is the final implementation that lead to a successful patch to resolve the requirement of the breaking Ransack v4.0.0 change.

# config/initializers/ransack_patch.rb

module RansackPatch
  def ransackable_attributes(auth_object = nil)
    authorizable_ransackable_attributes
  end

  def ransackable_associations(auth_object = nil)
    # The method below calls the exact code I had in my initial implementation which is: reflect_on_all_associations.map { |a| a.name.to_s }
    authorizable_ransackable_associations
  end
end

ActiveSupport.on_load(:active_record) do
  extend RansackPatch
end

How to test OmniAuth Params

Sat, 14 Jan 2023 09:22:32 -0600

OmniAuth provides some tooling for mocking OAuth requests in your test suite. This is handy because your tests don't have to redirect to a production OAuth provider like Twitter, authenticate with real credentials, and then handle the response.

Instead, you can set test mode in OmniAuth and then add a mock OAuth provider. This will allow your tests to skip the production OAuth process and simulate it in your test environment.

One problem is testing additional params you might pass to OmniAuth. For testing, you normally just request the callback URL for the mock request. If you test only with the callback url however, the params will not be present. This is because the params are stored in the session, so you need an additional request beforehand to set those params in the session.

To test OmniAuth params, we need to first POST to the OmniAuth URL with params. This will make a fake request that sets the session OmniAuth params and sets a few other things. You can see exactly what it does here: https://github.com/omniauth/omniauth/blob/v2.1.0/lib/omniauth/strategy.rb#L317

Here's the relevant bit:

def mock_request_call
  setup_phase

  session['omniauth.params'] = request.GET
  # ...

After making the mock OAuth request, we can make the mock OAuth callback request to process it. This will now have access to omniauth.params in the session and we now have a functional test!

You can see here in the mock callback call that it sets omniauth.params to the params from the session:

@env['omniauth.params'] = session.delete('omniauth.params') || {}

Here's an example of how to test OmniAuth params with a Rails integration test. You can use this same process to test OmniAuth params with Rspec.

require "test_helper"

class OmniauthCallbacksTest < ActionDispatch::IntegrationTest
  setup do
    OmniAuth.config.test_mode = true
    OmniAuth.config.add_mock(:developer, uid: "12345", info: {email: "[email protected]"}, credentials: {token: 1})
  end

  test "can connect a social account with another model" do
    # Sets omniauth.params to {"foo" => "bar"} and redirects to the OmniAuth callback URL
    post "/users/auth/developer?foo=bar"

    # Process the OAuth callback which has omniauth.params set
    follow_redirect!

    # Add your assertions here
  end
end

Bundler default gem dependency error

Fri, 06 Jan 2023 19:54:46 -0600

Have you seen the following error?

You have already activated uri 0.10.0, but your Gemfile requires uri 0.12.0. Since uri is a default gem, you can either remove your dependency on it or try updating to a newer version of bundler that supports uri as a default gem. (Gem::LoadError)

You have already activated strscan 3.0.1, but your Gemfile requires strscan 3.0.2.
Since strscan is a default gem, you can either remove your dependency on it or try updating to a
newer version of bundler that supports strscan as a default gem. (Gem::LoadError)

I've run into this with uri, strscan, and other gems. "bundle install" works fine, but running a command like "bundle exec rails assets:precompile" fails with the error above.

So what gives?

The Solution

The issue lies with Rubygems being outdated. If you update RubyGems, it will fix the issue.

gem update --system

Black Friday 2022 Deals on GoRails, courses, and Jumpstart Pro!

Wed, 23 Nov 2022 14:54:40 -0600

It’s Black Friday again, and this is our once-a-year sale!

It’s our way of saying thanks for all your support. You've been a huge part of making GoRails a success and Collin & I can't thank you enough. 🥰

Here's what we've got going on this year:

36% off GoRails with the yearly plan - Get the deal

Get a yearly subscription to GoRails for just $144/year. That's only $12/mo to stay up-to-date with Hotwire, Rails 7, Ruby 3, and much more!

Gifting GoRails

$50+ off Jumpstart Pro (Rails, iOS & Android) - Get the deal

Choose either the Rails, iOS, or Android template and get $50 off a single site license or $150 off an unlimited license.

We built Hatchbox.io using Jumpstart Pro and you can check out lots of other Jumpstart Pro examples that our customers have turned into life changing businesses.

This is the time we've ever run a sale on Jumpstart Pro Android, so now is a great time to snag a copy if you've been waiting.

$50 off Advanced Ruby: Behind the Magic - Get the deal

This course is everything I wish I knew about Ruby when I started as a Rails developer. We cover 6+ hours of Ruby techniques used in Rails and other Rubygems to see how they work from scratch.

$50 off Refactoring Rails - Get the deal

Ben Orenstein's Refactoring Rails course is one I refer back to several times a year. It's a great set of strategies for cleaning up and better organizing your code.

$50 off Payments with Ruby on Rails Master Class - Get the deal

That's everything! I just want to say thanks for everything and allowing us to do this for a living.

2022 has been an exciting year and there are some secret things for 2023 that Collin & I have been working on that I can't wait to share with you soon.

If you have any questions, hit reply and let me know. 👋

How To Test A Rails Rubygem Against Multiple Databases

Wed, 30 Mar 2022 16:07:42 -0500

If you're building a Rubygem that integrates with Rails and ActiveRecord, you'll probably want to test against multiple databases. This is pretty easy to setup for CI where you can run multiple databases in Docker containers with different steps, but what about local development?

The DATABASE_URL is typically used for setting the production database for your Rails app. Hatchbox, Heroku, Render, etc all will set this environment variable for Rails to pick up and use the correct database.

You might not realize that the DATABASE_URL can also be used for other things like testing!

Instead of running rails test like normal, you can prepend the DATABASE_URL env var to change the database.

For example, we can change from the default database to Postgres

DATABASE_URL=postgres://127.0.0.1/test_db rails test

You can even take this a step further and write a script to test each of the databases:

#!/usr/bin/env bash

echo "Testing against SQLite3"
rails test

echo "Testing against PostgreSQL"
DATABASE_URL=postgres://127.0.0.1/test_db rails test

echo "Testing against MySQL"
DATABASE_URL=mysql2://root:@127.0.0.1/test_db rails test

Black Friday 2021 Deals on GoRails, courses, and Jumpstart Pro!

Tue, 23 Nov 2021 22:17:50 -0600

I run sales once a year on Black Friday as a way of saying thank you. You've been a huge part of making GoRails a success and I can't thank you enough. 🥰

Here's what we've got going on this year:

36% off GoRails with the yearly plan - Get the deal

Get a yearly subscription to GoRails for just $144/year. That's only $12/mo to stay up-to-date with Hotwire, Rails 7, Ruby 3, and much more!

If you're already subscribed to GoRails, you can upgrade from the monthly plan to lock in the savings.

$50+ off Jumpstart Pro (Rails & iOS) - Get the deal

Choose either the Rails or iOS template and get $50 off a single site license or $150 off an unlimited license.

We've never run a sale on Jumpstart Pro before so be sure to snag a copy while you can! Read on to see some exciting new updates for Jumpstart Pro that we recently launched.

$50 off Advanced Ruby: Behind the Magic - Get the deal

This is also the first time I've discounted the Advanced Ruby course! This course is everything I wish I knew about Ruby when I started as a Rails developer. We cover 6+ hours of Ruby techniques used in Rails and other Rubygems to see how they work from scratch.

$50 off Refactoring Rails - Get the deal

Ben Orenstein's Refactoring Rails course is one I refer back to several times a year. It's a great set of strategies for cleaning up and better organizing your code.

$50 off Payments with Ruby on Rails Master Class - Get the deal

That's everything! I just want to say thanks again for everything and allowing me to do this for a living. 2021 has been a crazy year and there are some secret things I've been working on that I can't wait to share with you soon.

If you have any questions, hit reply and let me know. 👋

How to render ActionText Attachments in Plain Text

Tue, 02 Nov 2021 10:12:26 -0500

ActionText supports custom attachments using Signed Global IDs. We can use this to embed any database record in Rails such as @mentions for users.

For HTML, Rails will use the to_partial_path to render the HTML template for the attachment. For a user, this would be app/views/users/_user.html.erb.

With Plain Text output, Rails will default to the caption specified on the attachable. Typically, this is nil because we don't need a caption for an @mention.

By defining the attachable_plain_text_representation method, we can specify the default value for the plain text ActionText output.

class User
  include ActionText::Attachable

  # When ActionText rendering mentions in plain text
  def attachable_plain_text_representation(caption = nil)
    caption || name
  end

And that's it! Simply render your ActionText content as plain text and it will use this method for rendering.

How to use Partials in Rails

Tue, 23 Feb 2021 15:38:18 -0600

If you want to keep your code simple and/or reuse a block of code in multiple files, then you can store that code in an html.erb file called a partial.

Create partial 🧩

Go to app > views.
Create a folder called shared.
Create a file to store your code in and name it using the syntax: _[partial].html.erb Insert partial ⬇️

In the file where you want to include the code from a partial, insert the tag
<%= render partial "shared/[partial]%>

View page 👀

You’ll see your page with the code from the partial included.

How to add a Root Route to your Rails app

Tue, 23 Feb 2021 15:37:51 -0600

You need to replace the default, “Yay! You’re on Rails” landing page with a real index page for your app.

Create a route 🛤️

Go to config > routes.rb file
In the Rails.application.routes.draw method, enter the route: get root, to: "main#index"

Create a controller 👨‍✈️

Go to app > controllers folder
Create a file named main_controller.rb
Create a class named MainController and inherit from ApplicationController
Define a method named index.

Create a view 🏞️

Go to app > views folder
Create a folder named main
In that folder create a file named index.html.erb
Add HTML

View new page 👀

Go to http://localhost:3000
You’ll see the new page

How to add a Page to your Rails app

Tue, 23 Feb 2021 15:37:06 -0600

⚠️ This is how to add a page without any interaction with the model.

Create a route 🛤️

Go to config > routes.rb file
In the Rails.application.routes.draw method, enter a route using the syntax: [request type] "[URL]", to: "[controller]#[action]"

Create a controller 👨‍✈️

Go to app > controllers folder
Create a file named [route]_controller.rb, e.g. about_controller.rb
Create a class named [Route]Controller and inherit from ApplicationController
Define a method named [action from routes.rb], e.g. index

Create a view 🏞️

Go to app > views folder
Create a folder named [route]
In that folder create a file named [action.html.erb]
Add HTML (and ERB)

View new page 👀

Go to http://localhost:3000/about
You’ll see the new page
Open Web Inspector
👀 You’ll see the request from the browser and the response from the server for the GET request to the /about URL.
View the page’s source code
👀 You’ll see the content that Rails added code from app > views > layouts > application.html.erb and inserted the code from index.html.erb inside the <%= yield => ERB tag.

How HTTP Requests work in Rails

Tue, 23 Feb 2021 15:36:19 -0600

Process overview

⚠️ This is how HTTP requests work without any interaction with the model.

[request] ➡️ routes.rb ➡️ [controller] + [action] ➡️ view ➡️ browser

A browser sends an HTTP request
The Rails server receives the request
routes.rb tells Rails which [controller] + [action] to send the request to (e.g. about#index)
The [controller] receives the request and runs code in the method that matches the [action] from routes.rb
Rails generates a view (e.g. index.html.erb)
Rails sends the view back to the browser
The browser renders the view

⚠️ A model is included in later guides.

🔗 Link to REST tutorial via Thoughtbot

Black Friday 2020 Deals

Wed, 25 Nov 2020 22:53:51 -0600

This is a special time of the year to give back to the Ruby on Rails community. You have so wonderful and supportive of GoRails. 🤗

I'm running a big sale across all the GoRails products this year. I only do this once a year so if you're thinking about grabbing a GoRails subscription, Jumpstart Pro, or one of my courses, grab it now! Deals end on November 30th, 2020.

36% off GoRails with the yearly plan - Get the deal

You can get a yearly subscription to GoRails for just $144/year. That's $12/mo to keep up-to-date with the latest Ruby on Rails features, learn testing, and how to build features for your products.

If you're already subscribed to GoRails, you can upgrade from the monthly plan to lock in the savings.

Buy Jumpstart Pro and get 3 free months of Hatchbox.io - Get the deal

Jumpstart Pro is a pre-built Ruby on Rails application template that comes with Authentication, Teams, Payments (with Stripe SCA support), an API, and a ton of other features ready out of the box.

We know hosting can be expensive when you're spending your savings trying to launch a production idea. That's why we're bundling 3 months of Hatchbox.io so you can deploy your apps without worrying about hosting costs eating into your rent money.

In 2021, we'll be working on Jumpstart Pro to include updates for the new Turbolinks and Stimulus changes coming soon. Since we have a lot of ongoing maintenance, I'm going to change the pricing to start charging for yearly updates with new customers in the future. Now is a great time to buy Jumpstart Pro and be grandfathered in for free updates for your license forever!

$50 off Payments with Ruby on Rails Master Class - Get the deal

I recently launched the new Payments with Ruby on Rails master class with updates for the all new Stripe APIs. If you need to add Strong Customer Authentication for payments in your application, now's the time to buy the course. I spent 3 months learning and implementing the Stripe changes for SCA so you don't have to.

The price goes up to $149 after December 2nd, so make sure to snag the course while you can.

$50 off Refactoring Rails - Get the deal

Ben Orenstein (who you probably know from Tuple.app and expert Vim skills) teaches a wonderful course on the refactorings, patterns, and best practices that will let you ship quickly even as your Rails app matures.

I personally went through this course and regularly reference it when I refactor my code.

Private Livestreams for Advanced Ruby: Behind The Magic students - Get the deal

I wanted to do something special for the Advanced Ruby course since it is BRAND NEW! This course covers tons of techniques that the Rails core team and gem developers use to build fantastic libraries in Ruby. These are things you won't typically see in day-to-day Rails code, but knowing these things can drastically improve your Ruby code (whether it's in a Rails app or not).

For Black Friday, I'm doing several private livestreams exclusively for Advanced Ruby students. I'll be answering questions, refactor Ruby snippets with you, and most importantly I will show you how to apply these techniques in a real example: the Pay gem.

That's everything! 2020 has been a hard year and I wanted to say thanks for your support. I'm incredibly fortunate to be able to do this for a living. Thank you so much for making that possible!

If you have any questions, send me an email at chris @ gorails dot com

Dynamic Footer Timestamp in Rails

Tue, 31 Dec 2019 12:26:40 -0600

Ever seen the typical copyright message at the bottom of a website that's out of date? Yep. A surprising amount of websites have them!

Someone just hard coded the year and called it a day.

That's fine and dandy and it's not hard to change, but it's easy to forget you need to update it.

A better solution? Use Rails to dynamically generate it.

This will always print the current year in your footer. We use Date.current because we're using Rails and this method will take into account the current time zone in Rails.

You can also use Date.today.year to use pure Ruby, but this won't apply the current time zone to the calculation.

Either way, this is will display the current year from the server side and will always be accurate.

An alternative is to use client side Javascript for this, but it will instead use the browser's timezone so it will display the year in their time zone.

Limit Webpacker RAM on compile for production

Thu, 12 Dec 2019 08:44:46 -0600

If you're deploying Rails to production with Webpacker, you might run into a Compilation failed error from Webpacker.

Often this happens because Webpacker runs out of RAM and the operating system kills the command for using too many resources. Modern VPS servers run on SSDs and don't enable a swap file by default because it can cause additional wear on the SSD and significantly reduce the lifetime of the drive. A side effect of this is the operating system is more aggressive with killing processes when it runs out of RAM.

To confirm this is your problem, you'll want to make sure that compiling assets doesn't throw any errors because of broken code. Update config/webpacker.yml to have webpack_compile_output: true and redeploy. If you are getting an error now, then you probably just need to fix that and you aren't running out of RAM.

Getting the "Compilation failed" error from Webpacker?

Try setting NODE_OPTIONS="--max-old-space-size=350" in your environment variables.

What this will do is tell Node.js that it can only use up to 350MB of RAM. This applies to your yarn install and webpack compile steps and will force it to run within those limits.

If you set this number too low, you'll get an error that Node.js was unable to allocate memory. You can try raising the max-old-space-size number until your compiles are working again.

This is really helpful if you're compiling webpack assets on a 1GB of RAM server and already have Rails, Sidekiq, Postgres, Redis, etc running. The free RAM will only be a portion of the 1GB left, so in our case, we could set it to 350MB of RAM to keep the OS from killing our webpack precompile.