#​588 — January 27, 2022

Read on the Web

✍️ Last week's issue had so many interesting bits of news that it was a hard act to follow, so while this is a quieter week in the Ruby world, be sure to check last week's issue too if you skipped it at all :-)
__
Peter Cooper — Editor

Ruby Weekly

RPush 7.0: The Push Notification Service — An abstraction over numerous push notification systems, including those from Apple, Google, Amazon, and more. This 7.0 release adds Ruby 3.1 and Rails 7.0 support.

Ian Leitch

Building GraphQL APIs in Rails — GraphQL is a flexible, strongly-typed query language, and while it doesn’t naturally mesh directly to Rails' typically REST-oriented approach, there are ways to make it possible, and if you don’t even know why you might use GraphQL, David does a good job of explaining it all here.

David Sanchez

ButterCMS Melts into Your Ruby App. #1 Rated Headless CMS — ButterCMS is your content backend. Enable your marketing team to update website + app content without needing you. Try the #1 rated Headless CMS for Ruby today. Free for 30 days.

ButterCMS sponsor

Spree Commerce 4.4: The Open Source Rails Ecommerce System — Spree is a long standing ecommerce system built on top of Rails and 4.4 is a big release for them including using Hotwire for a smoother dashboard experience, features for selling digital downloads, wishlist functionality, and more. Solidus is another option in this space; it began life as a fork of Spree.

Spree Commerce

IN BRIEF:

Jobs

Go Engineer — Help us scale one of the biggest Postgres-powered Rails majestic monoliths in the world.
Buildkite

Senior Rails Developer @ Wherefour (100% Remote) — Curious how stuff gets made? Come build great software that makes great products.
Wherefour

Find Ruby Jobs Through Hired — Create a profile on Hired to connect with hiring managers at growing startups and Fortune 500 companies. It's free for job-seekers.
Hired

📕 Articles & Tutorials

Using Entropy for User-Friendly Strong Passwords — A look at the approach database platform PlanetScale took with their signup form to enforce strong passwords while also playing nicely with password managers.

Mike Coutermarsh (PlanetScale)

Build Your Own Concurrency Control in Sidekiq — If you’ve got background jobs you want to perform sequentially, a locking system may be useful. Sidekiq::Sequence or SidekiqUniqueJobs may also be useful if you need similar functionality out of the box.

Mihai Colceriu

Enqueue Jobs Quickly with Sidekiq’s Bulk Features — What if you have the opposite problem.. lots of jobs you want to cram into Sidekiq as fast as possible? Andy Croll has your back, and can get you down from lots of trips across the network to just one.

Andy Croll

Free eBook: Efficient Search in Rails with Postgres — Speed up a search query from seconds to milliseconds and learn about exact matches, trigrams, ILIKE, and full-text.

pganalyze sponsor

Upgrading Rails from 6.1 to 7.0: Things to Consider — A tactical upgrade guide from the company that makes a business around upgrading Rails.

Cleiviane Costa (FastRuby.io)

Switching from Webpacker 5 to jsbundling-rails with webpack — Since there will be no Webpacker 6, you might want to be aware of this.

Rails Contributors

Test and Optimize Your Rails App's Database Performance — Quickly covers three ways to investigate problems and then seven ways to mitigate said problems.

Milap Neupane

Working with Ruby C Extensions on a MacBook — While some of this is Mac-focused, there are loads of linked resources that dive deeper, so if you’re interested in Ruby and C, this is a fine place to start.

Ulysse Buonomo

Rails 7's Support for Postgres' Generated Columns
Swaathi Kakarla

🛠 Code & Tools

Que 1.0: A Ruby Job Queue That Uses Postgres's Advisory Locks — A perfect use for Postgres’s built in advisory locking mechanism to bring more reliable job queue functionality to Ruby by using said locks to protect the state of the jobs.

Chris Hanks

Puma 5.6 Released: A Rack Web Server Built for Concurrency — This particular release shares a nickname with Nate Berkopec’s daughter! :-)

Puma Team

Shortcut Puts the Agile in Agile and the “Can” in Kanban

Shortcut (formerly Clubhouse.io) sponsor

Wasabi: A Simple WSDL Parser — Web Services Description Language is an XML-based language for defining web service functionality (frequently used with SOAP).

Daniel Harrington

Sidekiq 6.4: Simple, Efficient Background Processing for Ruby — We've mentioned it a few times already in this issue, but there's a new release too ;-)
Mike Perham

rails_param: Parameter Validation and Type Coercion for Rails
Nicolas Blanco

MemoWise 1.6: A Modern Choice for Ruby Memoization — Now officially supports Ruby 3.1.
Panorama Education

React on Rails: Bringing React, Webpack, and Rails Together with Webpacker
ShakaCode

Counter Culture 3.2: 'Turbo-Charged' Counter Caches for Rails Apps
Magnus von Koeller

💡 Tip of the Week



File Methods: Part Two

In last week's tip, we learned about __FILE__, which gives us the path to the current file, and File.expand_path which gives us the full absolute filepath.

File.dirname

As the name implies, File.dirname will give us the path to the directory of a file. Combining this with what we learned last week, this means that if we had a file at ruby_weekly/sample.rb with the following contents:

puts File.dirname(__FILE__)

..we could run it and see the directory:

$ ruby ruby_weekly/sample.rb
ruby_weekly

Interestingly, in Ruby 3.1, File.dirname introduced an optional second parameter, an integer which represents how many levels to go up the directory tree. So for instance, if the full path to the above file is /Users/jemmaissroff/ruby_weekly/sample.rb, and we edit the file slightly to use the full path, and a second argument:

puts File.dirname(
       File.expand_path(__FILE__), 2
     )

we'll see the path to the directory two up the directory tree from our file:

$ ruby ruby_weekly/sample.rb
/Users/jemmaissroff/

File.join

Last up in File methods (I promise we're getting there!), File.join joins its arguments with a "/" to create a filepath. For instance:

File.join("app", "controllers", "file_name.rb")
# => "app/controllers/file_name.rb"

Notice this is exactly the same as if we'd run:

["app", "controllers", "file_name.rb"].join("/")
# => "app/controllers/file_name.rb"

This can be useful to construct a file path from a relative file. Before Ruby 3.1 introduced the second argument to File.dirname, it was often used to join ".." which takes us one directory up the tree.

Why are all of these file methods relevant? Some gems or Ruby applications often use a combination of them to load the appropriate files.

Take a look at this code (split across multiple lines for email formatting reasons) and see if you now can decipher exactly what it's doing!

File.expand_path(
  File.join(
    File.dirname(__FILE__, 2), 'lib'
  )
)

This week’s tip was written by Jemma Issroff.