Using Solid Queue in Development with Docker and on Heroku
I recently started a small project that needed Active Job and thought I’d try out the Solid Queue backend. If you haven’t been keeping up, Solid Queue is a d...
rails
How I Start Rails Projects v2
An update to my somewhat popular How I Start Rails Projects post. As before, I start with:
When you can’t use cookies
So, I’ve looked at the utility and security of cookies and I’ve at looked the utility and security of sessions. It you’ve been following along, then you know...
Capistrano SSH
A quickie this time. I use Capistrano to deploy my Rails apps. There was a gem for Capistrano 2 that added an ssh command as in:
Rails in Session
Last time I took a reasonably deep dive in cookies. Cookies can keep state information and setting for visitors to a site. However, by default they aren’t se...
C is for (HTTP) Cookies
I’ve been working on a post about using JWTs JSON Web Token (JWT) when you can’t use HTTP cookies for sessions. As I dug into it, I came to realize that unde...
Secret Rails Configurations
Last time, I looked at keeping environment specific configuration using YAML files and Rails.application.config_for. One big issue with this approach is secu...
Custom Configuration for Rails Environments
Previously, I looked at the simply way of creating Rails stages that shared same configuration with Production by simply importing production.rb into the new...
Quick and Dirty Rails Environments
A quick tip — When I’m deploying Rails apps to Staging or Beta I try to keep the configuration as close to Production as possible. I’ve gotten bitten one too...
Importing Legacy Data into Your Rails App
Sometimes you have to write a new Rails app for old data. One approach is to keep the old format and carefully craft your ActiveRecord models to work with th...
Getting the ngrok URL
A quick addendum to my previous ngrok post. If you are not using subdomains, it can be useful for your app to know what ngrok’s dynamically generated URL is....
Autostart ngrok with Rails
I’ve been using ngrok on quite a few projects lately. I’ve written about it before, but in short, it solves to problems for me.
How I Start Rails Projects
Everyone has their patterns, here’s mine for starting a new Rails project:
Get the MIME Type of a Random Upload in Rails
It’s surprisingly hard to find info on getting the MIME type of a file in Rails. Rails has MIME::Type (and the confusing and undocumented MIME::Types). You c...
Getting Uploaded Data Out of AWS S3
OK, so you know how to get data into AWS S3, what about getting it out? Previously, we uploaded entries from an imagined photo contest into a bucket. We sent...
Direct to S3 Uploads with AJAX Presigning
Previously, I covered uploading to S3 from a Rails app using a presigned-url. This works just fine, but means the data flows from the visitors computer to yo...
Uploading from Rails to AWS S3 with PreSigned URLs
Last time, I walked through directly uploading an image to an S3 bucket from the browser with no server involved. That last bit is important. If you are usin...
Tunneling to Localhost
When you’re developing Rails apps or pretty much any other framework you can name, you typically work with a server running on localhost. This is all well an...
The Sekrets Gem
I occasionally write about encryption in Ruby, yet somehow I haven’t managed to cover my friend Ara’s Sekrets gem.
Thin with SSL on El Capitan
Hit a bug, couldn’t find the answer, documenting it here for the next person.
Validating Rails Forms “without” a Model
Sometime I want all of Rails’ form bells and whistles for something that isn’t a database backed model. For example, I use this as a handy way to get form va...
(Symmetric) Encryption with Ruby (and Rails)
I wrote and maintain (though not as attentively as I’d like) a Ruby Gem, Strongbox, which adds Public-key Encryption support to Rails’ ActiveRecord. Simply p...
It’s in the Logs, Stupid
Yesterday, I was involved in a fire drill around the launch of a new Rails site on a very tight time frame. The site worked fine in development/staging, but ...
Dynamic Keys for Strongbox
Previously, Strongbox, my gem for using Public Key Encryption with ActiveRecord, allowed only one key pair for encrypting all of the records for a given Acti...
Introducing Strongbox
Over a year ago I wrote the wildly popular Encrypting Lots of Sensitive Data with Ruby (on Rails). At the end I said: Clearly, this screams for a plugin; w...
Dealing with read-only fields and partial updates in Rails 1.x
So, you have a column in your database you can’t update after the record is created. Not don’t want to update, but can’t. Specifically, you might have a c...
Quick and Dirty cropping images with attachment_fu
Rick Olson’s attachment_fu is a great plugin for attaching files documents to Rails models. It’s a rewrite of his acts_as_attachment plugin. While it can h...
Encrypting Lots of Sensitive Data with Ruby (on Rails)
Previously I wrote about how to use public key encryption to automatically encrypt data using Ruby (and thus Rails). Because this method can encrypt data wi...
Encrypting Sensitive Data with Ruby (on Rails)
In Encrypting Sensitive Data with Perl I wrote about how to use public key encryption to automatically and securely encrypt information with Perl. This allo...