Ruby Style Guide

ruby_style_guide.textile

Ruby/Rails Style Guide

Whitespace

• Use 2-space indentation (no tabs).
• Remove trailing whitespace.
• Use Unix-style line endings.
• Use spaces around operators, after commas, colons and semicolons, around { and before }.
• Use two spaces before statement modifiers (e.g. postfix if, unless, while, until, or rescue).
• Use empty lines to break up a long method into logical paragraphs.
• Keep lines to fewer than 132 characters.
• Do not indent temporary or debugging code (e.g. debugger), but keep flush with left column for visibility.
• Do not indent class access control statements (e.g. protected). That is, they should be aligned with the opening class and closing end lines.

Naming Conventions

• Method names should start with a lower case letter, and should be in all lower-case: method_name
• Prefer attr_reader, attr_writer, attr_accessor for simple attributes.
• Accessor and mutator methods are simply the name of the attribute (without get_ or set_ prefix).
• Prefer attribute= over set_attribute.
• Methods that return a boolean should end in ? and do not have the is_ prefix: prefer active? over is_active or is_active.
• Method names should end in ! if the method:
  • Changes the object directly, as opposed to returning a modified copy of the object.
  • Throws an exception on a failure condition, as opposed to returning nil or false.

Usage Conventions

• Always use parentheses around arguments in a function definition.
• Use && and || for boolean expressions, and and or for control flow.
• Avoid multiline ternary operator ( ?: ), prefer if.
• Prefer methods over comparisons, e.g.:
• Prefer unless over if !, except when there are elsif or else clauses.
  • t.empty? instead of t.size == 0
  • t.zero? instead of t == 0

HAML

• Use single space after = or -