There seems to be a lack of good rcov task samples out there. So after sending time fighting with it, I decided that I should share mine.

In order to speed up my rails application I added caching to both my javascript includes and stylesheet includes. It does the speed the webpage up, but rails does not regenerate these files on a subsequent deploy which makes it hard to add new functionality!!

To get around this problem I updated my cap deploy files to delete the cached files on deploy by attaching the following snippet at the bottom of my config/deploy.rb file:

namespace :deploy do
  desc "Deletes all.js and all.css"
  task :delete_cached_files, :roles => :web do
    all_js = File.join(current_path,'public','javascripts', 'all.js')
    all_css = File.join(current_path,'public','stylesheets', 'all.css')
    run "rm #{all_js} #{all_css}"
  end
end

after "deploy", "deploy:delete_cached_files"

The dynamic nature of ruby can sometimes make it difficult to track down the location of a method in your code, but it’s quite simple with the console. Just call method on the object in question passing in the method you are trying to locate as a symbol.

For instance, if you want to find the implementation of the method days in the Fixnum class just execute the following

30.method(:days)

And it will return

#<Method: Fixnum(ActiveSupport::CoreExtensions::Numeric::Time)#days>

You can see that our method can be found in ActiveSupport::CoreExtensions::Numeric::Time.

And on a side note, if you want to find out your inheritance hierarchy just send the ancestors method to your class like so

Array.ancestors

I just started working on a personal rails project and was shocked to find out that rails doesn’t log messages to STDOUT. Digging through a project at work I noticed that some one added the following to the end of config/environment/development.rb. It’s really a great convenience!

config.logger = Logger.new(STDOUT)
config.logger.level = Logger::INFO