Up until recently, managing external CSS and JavaScript dependencies in Rails apps was a big pain. Solutions varied from just checking the latest downloaded version of a library into source control and forgetting about it to using Bower to manage dependencies.
Take a look at your vendor/assets directory. How old are the libraries there?
How often do you remember to check for new versions? There could be some
serious bugs discovered and fixed, maybe even security issues resolved.
Most of the developers are creatures of habit. Once they get comfortable with an editor, a set of shortcuts or a terminal setup they tend to stick to it for a long time. In this post I will show how to share and keep application configs and so called dotfiles in sync across machines. It's very useful when you have a desktop at the office and a laptop at home.
To accomplish that we are going to use a simple tool called mackup and Dropbox. Mackup keeps your application settings in sync using Dropbox as a storage. It can be installed using homebrew or downloaded as a script, we will do the latter because we want to modify this script later on.
Generating PDF files with custom fonts can be tricky. In this tutorial we will create a simple Rails app and tackle this problem with two tools: wicked_pdf and wkhtmltopdf.
If you deploy your application to a staging environment, chances are that it will eventually get picked up by Google and other search engines. This is undesired for many reasons, from other people discovering your unfinished work to bad SEO from duplicate content.
"Inuit.css is a powerful little framework designed for serious developers." says the first sentence in a README file.
The biggest advantage of Inuit over other frameworks is modularity and focus on abstractions. It doesn't enforce how elements should look. Instead, it gives a set of tools which speed up your work and allow to test new things faster.
Migrating databases from one host to another can be a boring and time consuming task. Usually you need to make a database dump on the host A, compress it, transfer it to the host B, uncompress it and finally load it into the database. Things get even more complicated when we want to transfer database to a different database engine, say from MySQL to PostgreSQL.
Fortunately there is taps. It's a tool for migrating databases. From this post you will learn how to use it, how it works and how to resolve its most common problems.
Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) and its successor Transport Layer Security (TLS) are cryptographic protocols designed to provide secure connection between a server and a client, typically a web server and a browser or a mail server and a mail client.
This post will show a fast and easy way to add search to your Rails application. We will use Elasticsearch, an open source search engine, and Searchkick, an easy-to-use gem that integrates Elasticsearch with Rails.
Building most single-page applications (SPAs for short) is a two-step process: first you create a JSON API in a backend technology of choice and then you use that API in the JavaScript application. Here we'll be using Ruby on Rails on the backend and AngularJS on the frontend.
Bower is an open source software created by Twitter, which simplifies dependencies management and updating of front-end packages (like gridism or normalize). In general it is the same thing for HTML/CSS/JS what Bundler is for Ruby. Not so long time ago version 1.0 has been released and the current stable version is 1.2. Let's take a look at how to use it and integrate with a Rails app.