rails-dev-tweaks

A collection of tweaks to improve your Rails (3.1+) development experience.

To install, simply add it to your gemfile:

gem 'rails-dev-tweaks', '~> 1.1'

And review the following section to make sure that rails-dev-tweaks is configured the way you expect:

Intended Usage (and Caveats)

This gem is intended to provide a default configuration that covers most rails apps:

• All asset requests will not reload your app's code. This is probably only a problem if you are using custom sass functions, or otherwise referencing your app from within assets.

• XHR requests will reload your app's code. (This was not the case in prior versions of rails-dev-tweaks)

If any of these points don't work out for you, don't fret! You can override the defaults with some simple configuration tweaks to your environment. Read on:

Granular Autoload

You can specify autoload rules for your app via a configuration block in your application or environment configuration. These rules are specified via exclusion (skip) and inclusion (keep). Rules defined later override those defined before.

config.dev_tweaks.autoload_rules do
  # You can used named matchers (see below).  This particular matcher
  # effectively clears any default matchers
  keep :all

  # Exclude all requests that begin with /search
  skip '/search'
  # But include routes that include smerch
  keep /smerch/

  # Use a block if you want to inspect the request
  skip {|request| request.post?}
end

The default autoload rules should cover most development patterns:

config.dev_tweaks.autoload_rules do
  keep :all

  skip '/favicon.ico'
  skip :assets
  keep :forced
end

By default, every request that skips the autoload hooks will generate an additional log line saying so in an effort to be transparent about what is going on. If you prefer, you can disable that log message to keep things a bit more tidy in your logs:

config.dev_tweaks.log_autoload_notice = false

Named Matchers

Named matchers are classes defined under RailsDevTweaks::GranularAutoload::Matchers:: and simply define a call method that is given a ActionDispatch::Request and returns true/false on whether that request matches. Match names are converted into a module name via "#{name.to_s.classify}Matcher". E.g. :assets will specify RailsDevTweaks::GranularAutoload::Matchers::AssetMatcher.

Any additional arguments given to a skip or keep call will be passed as initializer arguments to the matcher.

:all

Matches every request passed to it.

:assets

Rails 3.1 integrated Sprockets as its asset packager. Unfortunately, since the asset packager is mounted using the traditional Rails dispatching infrastructure, it's hidden behind the Rails autoloader (unloader). This matcher will match any requests that are routed to Sprockets (specifically any mounted Sprockets::Base instance).

:forced

To aid in live-debugging when you need to, this matcher will match any request that has force_autoload set as a parameter (GET or POST), or that has the Force-Autoload header set to something.

If you are live-debugging jQuery ajax requests, this helpful snippet will turn on forced autoloading for the remainder of the browser's session:

$.ajaxSetup({"beforeSend": function(xhr) {xhr.setRequestHeader("Force-Autoload", "true")} })

:path

Matches the path of the request via a regular expression.

keep :path, /thing/ # Match any request with "thing" in the path.

Note that keep '/stuff' is just shorthand for keep :path, /^\/stuff/. Similarly, keep /thing/ is shorthand for keep :path, /thing/

:xhr

Matches any XHR request (via request.xhr?). The assumption here is that you generally don't live-debug your XHR requests, and are instead refreshing the page that kicks them off before running against new response code.

License

rails-dev-tweaks is MIT licensed by Wavii, Inc. http://wavii.com

See the accompanying file, MIT-LICENSE, for the full text.