derwiki

Adding an audit log to your Rails app

If you have any sort of administrative interface on your web site, you can easily imagine an intruder gaining access and mucking about. How do you know the extent of the damage? Adding an audit log to your app is one quick solution. An audit log should record a few things:

• controller entry points with parameter values
• permanent information about the user, like user_id
• transient information about the user, like IP and user_agent

Using the Rails framework, this is as simple as adding a before_action to your admin controllers. Here’s a basic version that I’m using in production.

makmanalp

Note: these are pretty rough notes I made for my team on the fly as I was reading through some pages. Some could be mildly inaccurate but hopefully not terribly so. I might resort to convenient fiction & simplification sometimes.

My top contenders, mostly based on popularity / community etc:

• Angular
• Backbone
• React
• Ember

Mostly about MVC (or derivatives, MVP / MVVM).

ralovely

#!/bin/sh
#
# Pre-commit hook that verifies if all files containing 'vault' in the name
# are encrypted.
# If not, commit will fail with an error message
#
# File should be .git/hooks/pre-commit and executable
FILES_PATTERN='.*vault.*\.yml$'
REQUIRED='ANSIBLE_VAULT'

samnang

class FacebookCommentNotifer
  def initialize(comment)
    @comment = comment
  end

  def save
    @comment.save && post_to_wall
  end

  private

adamwiggins

Make it real

Ideas are cheap. Make a prototype, sketch a CLI session, draw a wireframe. Discuss around concrete examples, not hand-waving abstractions. Don't say you did something, provide a URL that proves it.

Ship it

Nothing is real until it's being used by a real user. This doesn't mean you make a prototype in the morning and blog about it in the evening. It means you find one person you believe your product will help and try to get them to use it.

Do it with style

kevinold

#ack is a tool like grep, designed for programmers with large trees of heterogeneous source code

#to install ack, see http://betterthangrep.com/
#to use ack, launch terminal (mac osx) and type 'ack <some_keywords>'
#ack will search all files in the current directory & sub-directories

#here's how I have my config file setup. this file is located on mac osx here
# ~/.ackrc 

# Always sort the files

henrik

1. Your class can be no longer than 100 lines of code.
2. Your methods can be no longer than five lines of code.
3. You can pass no more than four parameters and you can’t just make it one big hash.
4. When a call comes into your Rails controller, you can only instantiate one object to do whatever it is that needs to be done. And your view can only know about one instance variable.

You can break these rules if you can talk your pair into agreeing with you.

zhengjia

=Navigating=
    visit('/projects')
    visit(post_comments_path(post))

=Clicking links and buttons=
    click_link('id-of-link')
    click_link('Link Text')
    click_button('Save')
    click('Link Text') # Click either a link or a button
    click('Button Value')