Recently while deploying an app to Heroku I noticed that the Sinatra app I was deploying was somehow being detected as a Rails app. Whenever I ran heroku run console. I would get the following error:

Running console attached to terminal... up, run.1
bundler: command not found: script/console
Install missing gem executables with `bundle install`

For some reason Heroku was looking for the Rails console. I thought about how one might detect the differences between these two types of apps and what the heuristics of a Rails app may be. Then I realized I had used a Rails convention in my app. I used config/environment.rb as a way to manage multiple envs for my app. I quickly changed this files name to config/env.rb and re-deployed. This immediately fixed the problem and Heroku now detects the Ruby/Rack application.

Lesson learned.

MacVim, Janus and Solarized look great but how do you bring that to your SSH sessions?

First install Vim with ruby support.

# install Vim with ruby support
sudo apt-get install vim-nox

Then let Janus take over…

# install Janus
curl https://raw.github.com/carlhuda/janus/master/bootstrap.sh -o - | sh

Solarized is packaged with Janus but the color settings are all wrong. Here’s how to get it right:

" ~/.vimrc.local
let g:solarized_termcolors=256
set t_Co=16
set background=dark
colorscheme solarized

Install it all:

# install Vim with ruby support
sudo apt-get install vim-nox

# install Janus
curl https://raw.github.com/carlhuda/janus/master/bootstrap.sh -o - |sh

# setup the solarized theme
curl https://raw.github.com/posterous/vim/master/vimrc.local > ~/.vimrc.local

Just a quick look at the new Posterous RubyGem.

Interactive Console

More to come…

While building out our API I have at times needed to validate the JSON that we are returning from endpoints or as object representations in the to_json method of our models. Typically I would just parse the returned JSON string and test the resulting value like so.

# contrived rspec but you get the idea
before do
  @post         = Post.new(:title => "Yup, I'm a post")
  @parsed_json  = JSON.parse(@post.to_json)
end

it "should include :title in it's JSON representation" do
  @parsed_json['title'].should == @post.title
end

That works fine and all but once you start validating a model this becomes terribly repetitive and a chore to maintain. After adding a quick patch to Object and a bit of yack shaving, I decided to give it gem cred and publish it.

Enter Pathy

Pathy adds a few convenience methods that make validating the JSON version of an object stupid easy.

Example

require 'pathy'

Object.pathy! # add the methods to all Objects

@json = %[ 
  {
    "string"  : "barr",
    "number"  : 1,
    "array"   : [1,2,3],
    "hash"    : {"one":{"two" : 2}}
  }
]

@obj = JSON.parse(@json)

puts @obj.at_json_path("number")
=> 1
puts @obj.at_json_path("array.1")
=> 2
puts @obj.at_json_path("hash.one.two")
=> 2

Rspec Matcher

it "should work as rspec matcher" do
  @obj.should have_json_path "hash.one"
end

Installation

gem install pathy

Source

https://github.com/twoism/pathy