Posts tagged best practices

You might remember my rant/advice on keeping your seed.rb file up-to-date.

Well, I’ve found something a very cool gem that might just do the trick when just giving the newbie a dump of the database isn’t possible for any reason: Seed Dump gem by rroblak

This gem will add a rake task that will generate a seed.rb file containing as much actual data from your development database (which is supposed to be consistent with your data model) as you want.

Simpy wonderful!

This one is pretty simple too, and very easy. Specify the version of the gems you are using in the Gemfile. Or in your environment.rb if you are into Rails Archaelogism. Wait, SPECIALLY if you’re dealing (or know that someone will) with old projects.

Let’s say you start developing a project and you want to use a gem.

  gem "capistrano-tasks" # shameless plug LOL

At that time, you’ll probably just go with whichever version rubygems throws at you. That’s ok. But when you deploy into staging for the first time, make sure to note down the version of the gem that’s being used in the staging machine and specify that version in the Gemfile.

    gem "capistrano-tasks", "~> 0.1.0" # shameless plug LOL

You’ll make your life a little easier when going into production for the first time because you’ll be using the same gem version (and dependencies), and A LOT easier for the next guy in line trying to get the project up and running.

Be a good guy and just try to think a little in advance and be nice to the future devs, or your future self. Anyway, it seems that you’re going to need to do this in Rails 4.

This one is simple, you might as well tattoo it all over your face, because it’s very likely you’re not doing it:

Keep your seeds.rb information up-to-date with your data model, for Pete's sake.

Make the next guy to work in that project’s life easier by not having him editing the seeds.rb file as he spends like two hours invoking rake tasks to setup database and getting fugly errors in the terminal one after another.

Be the good guy. You don’t know when you’re getting to continue other’s work in a project, and you that b-word they say about karma.