Alias an attribute with alias_attribute method. The first argument is the name for the new attribute, while the second argument is to identify the attribute that is already defined. class User < ActiveRecord::Base alias_attribute :username, :login ...

In Rails 3 files in lib/ are no longer loaded by default. It's a snap to auto load these classes by adding the following line to config/application.rb config.autoload_paths += %W(#{config.root}/lib) This is commented out around line 16. Either rep...

When mime types are registered they are placed in a hash constant EXTENSION_LOOKUP in the module Mime. For reference, the file with the relevant code is in rails/action_pack/lib/action_dispatch/http/mime_type.rb available on Github at https://github.com/r...

There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things. -- Phil Karlton Typically, we have three main branches at any given time in a project lifecycle. master, development and staging. Master is production ready code, d...

I just wrote and released my first Ruby Gem, Hashed Attributes https://rubygems.org/gems/hashed_attributes. It is a very simple ActiveRecord extension for saving variables through a serialized hash. The Gem will let you declare getter and setter methods t...

If you're running Rails in production it will by default be configured to let apache or nginx send files for you. If you're handling file downloads yourself with send_file send_file("path/to/file.txt") you will notice that the downloaded files are empty...

To remove files that are currently being tracked by git, you have to remove them from the "cache". Note, doing this will NOT delete the file on your local machine. It will still be there but not be tracked. git rm -r --cached supersecretpasswords.txt Yo...

There are a few ways to solve this problem. However, I think the easiest is to cache the day of the year that the user is born on as an integer. If stored alongside the timestamp we can quickly get a list but properly handle the full birthday elsewhere, s...

If you've named a branch beginning with two dashes "--", you're sort of in trouble because git interprets your branch name as a switch/flag. You can skip switches all together by supplying two dashes before your branch name git branch -d -- --index_for_...

Make a directory ( it can anywhere ) called baks/mysql mkdir -p /baks/mysql Create a file (it can be anywhere) called /root/mysql_backups.sh and put this script in it #!/bin/bash # modify the following to suit your environment export DB...