Here's a Ruby example of how to set a GitHub Actions secret using Octokit in Ruby. The secret needs to be encrypted before it is sent to the API. You need the octokit and rbnacl gems installed. require "octokit" require "rbnacl" client = Octokit::Client.new(access_token: ACCESS_TOKEN) value

New post over on the PlanetScale blog. This was the toughest N+1 performance problem I've faced. It shows a trick you can use to preload records, in a situation where includes doesn't cut it. Go check it out.

If you're in a tech lead role and struggling. Try this. Make a mindset shift. Ask yourself: "How can I not be the person who builds that?" This will feel hard because for years you have been good at building. You're used to taking on the hardest problems. You cannot

If you are debugging this error: LoadError: libmariadb.so.3: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory - /rails/vendor/bundle/ruby/2.7.0/gems/mysql2-0.5.5/lib/mysql2/mysql2.so The fix is having these packages installed for production: default-mysql-client default-libmysqlclient-dev Here's a full

Here's how you can silence/mute the initial Sidekiq error, but still report any errors after the first try. This reduces noise in the error tracker and makes any errors more actionable. def perform # Do work rescue SomeError => e retry_once_before_raising_error(e) end Read on to implement

Here is a quick and easy way to estimate the content-length of a request from the params being sent. I needed to do this recently in a Rails test. require 'rack' params = { mike: true } params_string = Rack::Utils.build_nested_query(params) content_length = params_string.length puts content_length

When using multi-node Elasticache memcached with Rails, it's critically important to get your setup correct. If you don't, your application will connect to memcached nodes at random (!!!). Resulting in low cache hit rates. How to setup Conveniently, there is a gem for this, dalli-elasticache. gem "dalli-elasticache" Using the gem for

Sidekiq 7.0.6 connecting to Redis with options If you have these all over your Rails test logs, here is how you can disable them for test. In test/test_helper.rb, add the following: Sidekiq.logger.level = Logger::WARN Now your test logs will be clean. This took

For as long as I can remember Rails has had this little quirk where it will auto generate index names that are too long. A couple weeks ago Andrew Culver tweeted out his wish for this to be improved. I'll contribute $500 to the bounty for anyone who is willing

I recently shared a couple of my favorite gems on Twitter. And people asked for more! These are my top 5 must have gems for any Rails app + my reasoning and some tips on how to best use them. 1. Pry 2. Flipper 3. Sidekiq 4. Rack::Attack 5. Prometheus

Over on the PlanetScale blog I just wrote up how we handle schema changes in our own Rails app. It's the best workflow I've ever used for Rails migrations. It's both inspired by and better than the custom tooling I had access to when working for GitHub. Click the big

I hit this error recently. To fix this, you need to update to a newer version of bundler. gem update bundler Good luck, hope this saved you some time. Error There was an error parsing `Gemfile`: `windows` is not a valid platform.

Recently I had some code that was doing 100's of find_by queries. Due to the way it was setup, a simple fix using includes wasn't possible. I was able to know which records would be called via find_by though, meaning I should be able to preload all the

Rails just recently added a default /up route that will return a 200 when the application is running. I've had to implement this in pretty much every Rails app I've ever worked on. This is a nice addition! If you're not familiar. This is useful for load balancers which need

I recently solved a Rails performance issue with exists? queries in our Rails API. Shared all the details on PlanetScale's blog. Check it out here: Solving N+1's with Rails exists queries.

Mastering the routes command will save you a lot of time. Here are a pro tips on how to use it. rails routes Prefix Verb URI Pattern Controller#Action new_user_session GET /sign-in(.:format) users/sessions#new {:subdomain=>"auth"} user_session POST /sign-in(.:format)

I recently customized the default Ghost Casper theme for this blog. It took me a while to figure out a good local development flow. Here is what I ended up with. 1. Install Ghost locally First, you need to be running a Ghost instance locally. Instructions for doing this are

Here's how to use ActiveRecord to query a JSON column in MySQL. In this example we have a json column user_settings. We want to find which records have theme set with a value. Model.where("JSON_EXTRACT(user_settings, '$.theme') IS NOT NULL").count JSON_EXTRACT is the