HTML-to-PDF or Prawn? Let’s look how these compare by generating an invoice using PDFKit and InvoicePrinter and examine performance, memory and usability. Continue reading
Creating staging and other environments in Rails
Ruby on Rails come with three environments by default – development, testing and production. But sooner or later one has a need for staging environment. And don’t get me wrong, you can (or should?) use the production settings there, but if you run it locally or on the same server as production, chances are you need a different database. And while you are at it, it may be handy to allow logging to console or change any other of Rails settings for that matter. In fact you can create as many other environments as you want and since it’s really easy I encourage you to do so. Continue reading
On managing Ruby versions
This is a little thought on packaged Ruby versions (mostly in Linux-based systems) and why I don’t get many people advising newcomers to start by installing RVM when in reality they just want to program Ruby. Continue reading
InvoicePrinter: generate PDF invoices and receipts in seconds with pure Ruby
They are many options how to generate PDF versions of your invoices in Ruby and the ones that do not come with system dependencies are often built on top of Prawn library. InvoicePrinter is no different. Here is a short announcement on what it is (and aims to be) and what not. Continue reading
Building and consuming JSON API with Crystal
When I firstly heard about Crystal language, I got really exited. It fixes exactly four problems I sometimes have with Ruby; types, speed, memory consumption and compilation to machine code. After many months silently following its development I decided to try it out for a simple program I need — a simple server standing between Google Maps API and my application to catch the geocoding responses in local Redis instance not to hit the limit imposed on using the service (plus, Google suggests you to do it anyway). Continue reading
Testing PDF generation in Ruby
If you have ever generated PDFs in your Ruby apps you were probably also asking yourself how do I test that the PDF turns out the way I want? Continue reading
Allowing Nginx to use a Puma/Unicorn UNIX socket with SELinux
If you are deploying Ruby web application on Fedora with Puma (or other) application server and Nginx web server as a proxy, you might encounter SELinux forbidding Nginx to use the Puma socket. Here is how to create a SELinux policy module that you can use during your server provisioning.
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Setting up git push code deploy to remote server
If you are setting up your own remote server/VPS you will probably like to make it easy to deploy your code with simple git push. In other words you want to setup something that providers such as Heroku or OpenShift let you do to deploy your code. Luckily, it’s very easy! Continue reading
Fix can’t cast RGeo::Geographic::SphericalPointImpl to point
If you are using Rails with activerecord-postgis-adapter 3.1.4 perhaps you got into a point where you were suddenly getting the following error:
can't cast RGeo::Geographic::SphericalPointImpl to point
What to do if Vagrant machine becomes unresponsive (KVM)
If you are using Vagrant with KVM (with vagrant-libvirt plugin) on Fedora, you might have experienced that sometimes the KVM virtual machine becomes unresponsive. Simply put you would wait forever for trying to ssh to the machine using vagrant ssh. It unfortunately happens to me sometimes when my laptop goes to sleep. So the simple answer is to avoid this and to always halt your Vagrant VMs when you finished working. Here is another thing to try out if you that happens and you don’t want to recreate the machine from scratch (vagrant destroy && vagrant up). Continue reading