Gems that Rock

Over the past year we’ve started many new rails projects. Each time we would experiment with different testing frameworks or gems to improve our development workflow, eventually settling on a core set that we use 90% of the time.

We recently decided to build on this by creating a Rails template tailored to our needs (cleverly named the ‘Jam Jar’). Using this template means that new rails projects will start tailored to our workflow.

The Jam Jar is still very much a work in progress and we’ll be talking about it more in a future post. Below are some of the gems we love the most. I skipped out the more obvious ones like rspec or factory_girls but you can have a look at the full list on Github. It would be really interesting to hear which gems you think we missed or disagree with, we’re @add_jam on Twitter.

Annotate

Github

Annotate has become a must in all of our Rails projects. Running annotate in your rails project will add a summary of the schema at the top of the file. It can also be used to annotate routes, factory_girl factories, fixtures and a bunch more.

The example below from the github readme demonstrates it’s usefulness.

# == Schema Info
#
# Table name: line_items
#
# id :integer(11) not null, primary key
# quantity :integer(11) not null
# product_id :integer(11) not null 
# unit_price :float 
# order_id :integer(11) 
# class LineItem < ActiveRecord::Base

Quiet Assets

Github

Another nice gem for development, quiet_assets mutes all of the log messages produced by the Rails asset pipeline so that you can see the ones that matter most.

Byebug

Github

This one is indispensable! Just put byebug anywhere in your code and you’ll get access to the REPL when execution reaches that line. Byebug is super easy to start using and supports all of the commands you’d expect like stepping over lines and into functions.

Forgery

Github

I only came across this gem recently but it’s definitely one that should be useful to most projects. Forgery allows you to generate anything from placeholder lorem ipsum text to addresses information, locations and personal information. We’ve been combining it with factory_girls to generate test models and for seeding our development database with reasonable values.

Timecop

Github

This gem is great for easily testing areas of your code that are dependent on the time or date. Timecop allows you to move through time, accelerate time or freeze time by overriding the responses from Date, Time, and DateTime.

Active Model Serializers

Github

This is probably the most well known gem on the list but it’s worth pointing out anyway. AMS allows you to create serializers that specify which attributes and relations will be serialized. Say we have a model Person(name: string, email:string, age:integer) and the person has many Comments, our serializer could look like this:

class PersonSerializer < ActiveModel::Serializer
  attributes :name, :age
  has_many :comments
end

Then in our controller when we do

render json: @person

The returned json would only have the specified fields, skipping others like created_at, updated_at, and email.

This is the simplest solution we’ve come across for serialization. It’s especially great if you’re working with Ember, which has built in support for the json output of AMS through the ActiveModelAdapter.

What else should we use?

What gems do you love that aren’t in the Jam Jar? Drop me an email or tweet me.

Originally published at addjam.com on January 31, 2015.