Tag: ruby

Recently, I had the need to run Ruby’s irb with multiple files already loaded.

After a bit of trial and error I came up with this which worked perfectly!

irb -r ./file1.rb -r ./dir/file2.rb

The files get loaded in order so if there are any dependencies in file2.rb on something in file1.rb, that works correctly.

Recently, writing a plain Roda app, I was facing a caching problem. I had a list and a detail page and whenever there was a list item clicked on I was using the flash plugin to maintain the item selected and highlighting the item when the list page was loaded.

However, on navigating back via the browser button, the cached page was showing up and the highlight would be on the previous selected item or not there at all.

I discovered asdf quite late! I was relying on a bunch of different programs to manage Ruby (rvm), Node (nvm).

asdf was an amazing headache saver. It already has core plugins for Elixir, Erlang, Node and Ruby. Plus, it has community plugins for what seems like practically anything under the sun.

I had installed asdf on a new system. And as usual, there were some crons to run on it. I kept getting a /bin/bash/ruby not found error.

After some time I realized I had faced this problem before as well!

The requirement was to add a column called position to the order_details table.

The order_details table is actually a table with a foreign key of order_id. The requirement is to increment the position starting from 1 in the position column grouped on order_id.

So, before the migration if the records are –

id  order_id
1   1
2   1
3   1
4   2
5   2
6   2

After the migration, the records should be –

id  order_id position
1   1       1
2   1       2
3   1       3
4   2       1
5   2       2
6   2       3

There are two solutions possible. One using window functions and one without.

The default method to pass arguments to Rake tasks is to give the parameters in square brackets –

desc 'Method #1: Use the default rake way to add two numbers and log the result'
task :add, [:num1, :num] do |t, args|
  puts args[:num1].to_i + args[:num].to_i
end

Reference: 4 ways to pass arguments to a Rake task

$ rake add[1,2]
# => 3

However, I would rather pass the arguments like this –

$ rake add 1 2
# => 3

There are numerous tips in Ruby but I seem to keep forgetting them and having to search for them every time. So high time I started documenting them out.

This one I learnt from 10 Tips & Tricks from Drifting Ruby. I’m only going to keep to Ruby specific ones.

There are multiple ways to run system commands from Ruby.

They are system, using backticks (‵), using %x(), using exec, or the more advanced option of using Open3. All of them behave in different ways.

system

The system method calls a system program. You have to provide the command as a string argument to this method. For example:

>> system("date")
Sat  4/10/2021   9:11:38
=> true

Note: In Windows, the date command also takes the input to change the system date after displaying the current system date. Press Enter to continue

The invoked program will use the current STDIN, STDOUT and STDERR objects of your Ruby program. In fact, the actual return value is either true, false or nil. In the example the date was printed through the IO object of STDIN. The method will return true if the process exited with a zero status, false if the process exited with a non-zero status and nil if the execution failed.