Favorite Tools for Working in Ruby / Rails

Over at the Shopify Enginneer Twitter account, an interesting question was posted that got me thinking about my favorite and most used Ruby/Rails tools. It’s nice to see what other devs are using so I thought I would share with you what I use the most on a daily basis. In a lot of cases, I’ve been using the same tools for over a decade.

1. Emacs

Those who know me, could have guessed this one. I’ve been a Emacs users for over twenty years - ever since starting out programming in Perl all those years ago. Since then, I’ve customized and maintained my configuration for web development and more specifically for Ruby / Rails development.

2. Tmux with Tmuxinator

I live in the terminal all day long - writing, coding, notes and more. Tmuxinator is by far the most used Ruby gem in my arsenal and helps me manages all my Tmux sessions with a simple YAML configuration file. Each Tmux session is a project more-or-less and inside each session I have windows and panes usually dedicated to a single task or context. Let’s take a look at an example, here is a Tmuxinator configuration for a typical Ruby on Rails project:

name: super-duper-project
root: ~/Workspace/active/super-duper
windows:
  - editor: emacsclient -t README.md
  - shell: clear
  - console: rails c
  - testing:
      layout: even-horizontal
      panes:
        - emacsclient -t test/test_helper.rb
        - bundle exec guard
  - logs: tail -f log/development.log
  - workers: dev

When I run tmuxinator super-duper-project in the terminal, Tmuxinator fires up Tmux and creates six windows in the project directory:

  1. editor: Starts and Emacs session by opening up README.md file to get things started.
  2. shell: Used for mostly running rake and rails commands.
  3. console: Starts a Rails console session for code exploration.
  4. testing: Starts an Emacs session in the test directory and splits the window with guard that watches for changes in test files and runs tests automatically as I update the code.
  5. logs: Tails the development log so I can see requests and errors.
  6. workers: Runs commands in the Procfile.dev file like the Rails server, yarn, and background workers.

Here is another configuration for this very website. I use Jekyll for this blog and have three windows setup. With command tmuxinator website, I can jump right into the project, run bundle exec jekyll draft "My new draft", in the shell window, start the Jekyll server, and start writing.

# ~/.tmuxinator/website.yml

name: website
root: ~/Workspace/active/website
windows:
  - editor: emacsclient -t README.md
  - shell:
  - server: bundle exec jekyll serve --drafts --livereload --livereload_port 8888

3. Minitest

I’ve written many times about Minitest and it’s been my standard testing framework for a long, long time. It’s strength is it’s simplicity, which results in a simpler test suite. Having a simple and straightforward test suite is crucial for long-term success. Here is an example of a simple, yet beautiful test:

# frozen_string_literal: true

require 'test_helper'

class DateTimeHelperTest < ActiveSupport::TestCase
  include DateTimeHelper

  let(:date_range) { nil..nil }

  subject { format_date_range(date_range) }

  describe 'with no range at all' do
    it 'does not format date' do
      assert_equal 'Anytime', subject
    end
  end

  describe 'with a date range on the same day' do
    let(:date_range) { DateTime.new(2022, 10, 12, 8)..DateTime.new(2022, 10, 12, 9) }

    it 'formats the date range on same day' do
      assert_equal 'Oct 12, 2022 08:00am - 09:00am', subject
    end
  end
end

4. Guard

As I mentioned in my Tmuxinator config above, I run Guard continuously in the background. Specifically, it watches for any changes to the code and runs related tests. Here is a real example Guardfile I have in most projects:

# frozen_string_literal: true

ignore %r{.git\/*},
       %r{public\/.*},
       %r{solr\/.*},
       %r{vendor\/.*},
       %r{tmp\/.*},
       %r{log\/.*},
       %r{coverage\/.*}

guard(
  :minitest,
  spring: 'bin/rails test',
  all_on_start: true,
  all_after_pass: true,
  grace_period: 3.0
) do
  watch(%r{^app/(.+)\.rb$}) { |m| "test/#{m[1]}_test.rb" }
  watch(%r{^app/controllers/(.+)_controller\.rb$}) { |m| "test/integration/#{m[1]}_test.rb" }
  watch(%r{^app/views/(.+)_mailer/.+}) { |m| "test/mailers/#{m[1]}_mailer_test.rb" }
  watch(%r{^test/test_helper\.rb$}) { 'test' }
  watch(%r{^test/.+_test\.rb$})
end

When any tests fail, I’m immediately notified and I hop into the ‘testing’ tmux pane and can see which tests are failing and fix it fast.

5. Amazing Print / Pry

At the same time as I’m fixing tests or writing new tests, each time I save a file, Guard re-runs the test giving me instant feedback. A lot of the time, I need to see what is being returned and Amazing Print comes in handy for this reason. I can simply add the line ap subject to the test and save the file. Guard will rerun the test and amazing print will print the results in full color. If I need to dig deeper, I can also drop in binding.pry, and Guard will “suspend” execution and let me Pry open the code for a closer look.

6. Rubycop

Rubocop is a static code analyzer and code formatter that helps me make sure I’m keeping inline with best practices thus increasing code health and maintainability. I have Rubocop integrated with my Emacs config that allows me to see in real-time any violations and/or recommendations on how the code could be written better. Plus paired with extensions like rubocop-rails, rubocop-performance and rubocop-minitest, I can get recommendations immediately for specific libraries and frameworks.

7. Simplecov

SimpleCov let’s me see how well my tests are covering the application code. SimplCov produces results in a very well organized html page where I can see pieces of code that didn’t get “touched” marked in a shade of red. I can write tests specifically that touches that code or remove the code if it’s not being used. It some cases, if the code isn’t touched, it means it’s not being used and I can remove the code all together keeping the project nice and tidy.

There are quite a few other tools that I didn’t mention, but the above seven tools form a solid base on what I use every day for Ruby/Rails development. I’ve enjoyed this particular setup for over a decade and will mostly like continue this setup for the next decade.