This week in open source

Since last week was Thanksgiving here in the States, here’s a double-whammy: everything that happened last week and everything that’s happened this week, in one blog post!

suspenders

The big deal with suspenders, our app app, is that version 0.3.2 is officially out! Since 0.3.1 on October 28th we’ve added an email validator, raised email delivery errors in the development environment, added Heroku support (try the --heroku flag), and switched to bundler for the gem itself.

While Dan Croak (croaky) was releasing 0.3.2 (40690ae) he also made sure to document the --heroku and --clearance flags (02a8bb0). Gabe Berke-Williams (gabebw) added a missing bundler/setup to the Rakefile, tying everything together neatly (d09ee5b).

shoulda-matchers, shoulda, high_voltage, bourne, pacecar, flutie, shoulda-context, factory_girl-rails

Above I mentioned how Gabe Berke-Williams (gabebw) added bundler/setup to the Rakefile of suspenders. He also did it to shoulda-matchers (9d79124), shoulda (8054563), high_voltage (ec656e1), bourne (9d21677), flutie (7863d14), shoulda-context (75a8384), factory_girl_rails (797a985), and pacecar of all things (fb972c0).

Wild.

bourbon

Version 1.2.0 of bourbon is out, bringing more Sass mixins into your life. Phil LaPier (plapier) added support for the CSS3 appearance (e888e0a) and background-size (4588c5c) properties, and added $georgia, $helvetica, $lucida-grande, and $verdana variables (4ba1cff). He also updated the docs to reflect this (d23064b), cleaned up some warnings (99946bb), and made the release (93beb25).

paperclip

The past two weeks saw an improvement for gem authors in paperclip: Mike Burns (mike-burns) removed the Paperclip::Options object, replacing it with a Hash. Any option you pass to has_attached_file is thus available to your underlying Paperclip extension without any extra work and with a canonical interface (5a7769b).

Prem Sichanugrist (sikachu) continued on his quest for having Paperclip work on CI with Rubinius; he tried removing the generated rbc files so the CI server will generate them every time (2c08152).

factory_girl

In the past two weeks factory_girl has seen three releases: 2.3.0 (85d4735, 2fdabdb, and 89b9a82), 2.3.1 (e15ae8d), and 2.3.2 (17eacf0). Joshua Clayton (joshuaclayton) has been hard at work, you see.

As a result, dynamic attributes and callbacks in traits are called in the right order, closing #247 (1eb7e1b and 65e5e25). Also, traits can be added to factories dynamically, when creating an object (442ba18). For example, if you have an :admin trait you can make an admin user on the fly with FactoryGirl.create(:user, :admin, :name => "Frank Blank").

The other pile of commits from Josh are all internal refactorings. Things like removing the Proxy#associate method in place of using Proxy#set everywhere (3ed2f62, f47c03c, and d3a7b7e), cleaning up the require statements (9472a14), consolidating and documenting all exceptions in the FactoryGirl class (c46c090), handling nil blocks when running a factory (2bf5cea) and when creating it in general (86f971b), delaying the sorting of attributes until the last minute by using a lighter-weight array instead of hash (d563b94), making bold claims about inheritance that some blog post authors disagree with (557cce6), moving Proxy::Stub#next_id into the private namespace (0c31b6e), taking an ignored argument to a block so some versions of Ruby don’t complain (c93dea5), defaulting the creation method to save instead of nil (5bbbcb9), singularizing Attribute#aliases_for? into Attribute#alias_for? (f247968), using his beloved Null Object pattern to reduce some conditionals (fba404a and b339c8f), adding a common #to_proc method across all attributes and then invoking methods with #[] instead of #call (fba6f33 and 3282eea), straight-up removing dead code from the AttributeList (56a6f67), and passing overrides through to the runner class (5fc57da).

Gotta break a lot of eggs to make an omelette. Speaking of, Gabe found a broken version.rb and fixed it (1e47af0).

clearance

Another doc week for clearance where Gabe Berke-Williams (gabebw) observed that we test it against Rails 3.1.0 (f7c5e3b) and Matthew Burket (Mab879) noted that you must migrate the database before running rake, when testing (39a6ac5 and 8b9e89b).

fake_braintree

New features in our Braintree fake object, appropriately named fake_braintree! Gabe Berke-Williams (gabebw) added support for FakeBraintree.generated_transaction (d1bbcb7, 917a235, 4fc470d, and 4cb5cb0), Braintree::Subscription.update (fab3c92), and Braintree::Customer.delete (c2aa516). Joe Ferris (jferris) started work on add-ons (312cfac).

Gabe also did some lovely documenting; now you can learn about how to use this in Cucumber (c163c4d), how to avoid calling FakeBraintree.activate (dff3e51), whether the build is broken (499cb05 and 1b1a532), and what the difference is between declining and verifying a card (625993a). Additionally the Subscription class was refactored (3ed090e), the tests were made more explicit (a23a61c), and the tests pass (0a12182).

Introducing Trajectory GitHub Integration

Today I’m pleased to announce the availability of one of our most requested Trajectory features, GitHub integration.

We’ve never really used the GitHub integration in any of the previous tracking/planning software we used because it’s so hard to use it consistently and well. When we set out to implement GitHub integration we set the bar high by insisting that it be something we would actually use. I believe we have done that with a new feature that I don’t believe has ever been done before for GitHub integration.

Now, when you start a story, Trajectory will indicate an auto-generated feature branch name (you can change the branch name, if you want). Any commits against this branch in GitHub will automatically be associated with the story. There is no need to include the story URL in the commit message, unless you are issuing a command to Trajectory (such as to Finish the story).

This functionality solves a real problem with the integration with GitHub while embracing the way many of you are probably already working with feature branches in your repos.

In addition to the feature branch integration, you can also include a link to stories in individual commit messages. When you do this, Trajectory will associate the commit to the story. Finally, you can issue commands to Finish a story in Trajectory from your commit.

You can read more specifics about this new functionality on our support site. If you’re already using Trajectory, go ahead and give it a try. If you’re not using Trajectory, sign up for a free trial and give it a try. You can even get started quickly by importing your Pivotal Tracker projects.

Last Week In Open Source

Mike Burns, the usual author of this post, was out last week so I’m filling in. Sorry it’s a little late. As usual we had a ton of activity around our open source projects.

Paperclip

Paperclip, our popular gem for image attachments, got a few bug fixes. Jeff Dutil (jdutil) changed the travis-ci build image to use https so that Github wouldn’t cache it (c0c9b69) meanwhile, David Faber (faber) fixed a bug with the :fog_public attachment option. Evgeniy Dolzhenko (dolzenko) pointed out a typo in one of the matchers (9f38928). To top it off our own Prem Sichanugrist (sikachu) configured Travis CI to test against REE (ab7db5a).

Factory Girl

Factory Girl, the gem that provides factories for readable tests, got a ton of love this week.  Jeff Dutil (jdutil) fixed the travis-ci images yet again (40d08ee). Our own Josh Clayton (joshuaclayton) and Thomas Walpole (twalpole) colaborated to add traits. Josh pushed out a new release too. Read the blog post or look at the commits to find out more. Ken Collins (metaskills) fixed a bug with the way overrides dealt with attribute definition order (4b83b1e). Thomas also fixed another attribute related bug (2ccbf45). Josh also fixed some issues with dynamic attributes of file attributes (8012d3d). Josh also bumped the version to 2.0.4 (be14aa) and replaced rr with mocha for mocks (554e6ab).

Capybara-Webkit

Cappybara-Webkit, the headless browser that runs your tests at lightning speed, got a few bug fixes too. Joe Ferris (jferris) disabled custom fonts to prevent crashing on OS X (82ae0c2). 

Paul Revere

Paul Revere, the gem that lets you easily add one off announcements to rails apps, got some documentation love this week from Matt Jankowski (mjankowski) He added usage documentation (810f6aa, f09b757) and fixed some existing documentation (2758eb1).

Bourbon

The fabulous vanilla sass mixins gem got some care from thoughtbot’s Phil Lapier (plapier). He changed the file extensions from .css.scss to .scss (2465a17) and released version 0.1.4 (920785d).

Kumade

Lots of changes in Kumade! It now uses a deploy branch for committing assets (2e11258), which means that those ugly Jammit compilation commits for Heroku don’t show up in your github repo. It no longer requires the deploy subcommand, so you can just do kumade staging instead of kumade deploy staging. It no longer detects the Cedar stack by default (bce4682), since heroku stacks requires permissions that you may not have, even if you can push to it. Instead, use the “-c” flag to indicate that your app uses the cedar stack. And just today, it got better integration tests (39fd463, f5902ae, 657f63d). None of these changes are released in a gem yet, but you can get it via git: gem "kumade", :git => "git://github.com/thoughtbot/kumade.git".

Laptop

Last but not least is Laptop, thoughtbot’s one stop shop for setting up a development environment. thoughtbot’s Dan Croak (croaky) changed the readme to recommend a standalone install of GCC instead of xcode (38d2458). He also added tmux (531645d) and updated the default ruby from 1.9 to 1.9.2 (a29cbe7). John Deerhake (jdeerhake) chipped in with a fix for ack on ubuntu (557736b).

Want to see your name on this list? Fork one of our projects and submit a pull request (with tests).

This week in open source

Another week of great pull requests to our open source projects.

kumade

A new gem, started by Gabe Berke-Williams (gabebw) with much help from Nick Quaranto (qrush), kumade is a drop-in Heroku deployer that handles assets, migrations, and sanity checks. It’s under heavy development so stay tuned to hear more, or try it out yourself.

The name comes from the Japanese word for “bamboo rake” and is pronounced “koo-mah-day”.

appraisal

Appraisal is our gem for testing engines against multiple versions of Rails—or really, for testing any gem against multiple gemsets. We use it to make sure our gems continue to work against various version of Rails.

Matt Griffin (betamatt) noticed that the excellent Aruba gem is listed as a runtime dependency even though it is most definitely a development dependency, and fixed that (276cc9b).

clearance

Clearance, our authentication engine, got a little formatting fix for the README (77bb97a) thanks to Quico Moya (qmoya).

factory_girl

Our popular fixture-improving testing gem, factory_girl, got more specs for assigning associations (841e012) from Josh Clayton (joshuaclayton) and a hard decision that non-block values are evaluated before block values (28f541e) thanks to Flavio Castelli (flavio).

Since we love pushing new versions while I’m writing this, Josh then pushed version 2.0.3 of factory_girl (ec88698).

capybara-webkit

Our headless webkit-based integration testing tool, capybara-webkit, saw a bunch of documentation and session love this week.

Dennis Prochniak (denysonique) and Diego Plentz (plentz) clarified documentation for Gentoo (9b53e01 and 8850f2d) and OS X Lion (47b8c86), respectively.

Then our Matt Mongeau (halogenandtoast) got it passing capybara’s session spec and session spec with JavaScript (c621e65, 983b556, 63e5a53, 5d50d77, 4642d33, and 81ad8fd). This means that the session object works exactly like any other capybara session object.

paperclip

Our file uploading gem, paperclip, got some love this week: Reinaldo de Souza Junior (juniorz) localized error messages by default (6fd2cf7) while Matthew Schulkind (mschulkind) generalized the filename extension then made it generate the correct one based on the content type (fdbd7bf).

paul_revere

We saw some bundler- and gem-related upgrades to paul_revere, the gem to add quick announcements to Rails apps, thanks to Christopher Meiklejohn (cmeiklejohn) (7d5eebc, 334bb25, 260db1a, 3039333, and e217b85).

bourbon

Phil LaPier (plapier) continues on with bourbon, cleaning up the README (02900ae) and fixing a bug in linear-gradient (4802351). He then pulled in a documentation fix from Andrés Mejía (andmej) to include box-shadow in the full list of mixins (78cf621) before releasing version 0.1.3 of bourbon (09a875f).

Continuous Integration

Nick Quaranto (qrush) went on a CI kick, trying Travis CI for our open source projects. He added it to high_voltage (1fcf319, d21b037, and cb4a53c), shoulda (928311d), and paperclip (8d95066, 6c501ef, 6cef277, e02613d, and 24cc278).

Prem Sichanugrist (sikachu) joined in on paperclip, fixing the Gemfile (e0bbebc) and adding JRuby support (b08c6c6).

This Week in Open Source

This week saw updates to our dotfiles, suspenders, capybara-webkit, factory girl, paperclip, bourbon, flutie, and clearance projects.

I’ve also added a file named CONTRIBUTING.md to each project, describing how to submit patches. Patches are welcome!

dotfiles

We maintain a set of configuration files for vim, zsh, and so on, in our dotfiles repository. Gabe Berke-Williams (gabebw) added the :Cuc command to vim which will run all scenarios (d57e450). You can pass text to restrict to just scenarios matching. As the commit message explains: :Cuc my text (no quotes) -> runs cucumber scenarios containing "my text"

suspenders

Alex Godin (alexgodin) added Cucumber as a development dependency to Suspenders (a57c975, 4fc3979, 6e429c5, and 872ff64), our app generator. He then noticed that prior versions of the gem were broken so he released version 0.2.6 of Suspenders.

capybara-webkit

Some great improvements to capybara-webkit, our headless JavaScript test driver for capybara. Mathieu Arnold (mat813) fixed the build for FreeBSD by making it require GNU make instead of depending on the system make (eca1376). As a big FreeBSD fan, I pulled this immediately.

Gabe Berke-Williams (gabebw) exposed the underlying socket to a logger, which verbosely prints information about all data sent to and from the headless browser (a4538b6 and 01665e6). Activate it by setting Capybara.javascript_driver = :webkit_debug.

factory_girl

The factory_girl and factory_girl_rails fixture-replacement gems got some small updates this week. The ever-commiting Gabe Berke-Williams (gabebw) handled documentation typos (cec108d and b3f8ac8) then updated the docs to point out the existance of the reusable Cucumber steps (49a47fa and 811fd04). Simon Hürlimann (huerlisi) continued on the documentation fixes by pointing out that factory_girl_rails is at version 1.1.0 (8bd8e0c).

Nick Quaranto (qrush) fixed the afore-mentioned Cucumber steps to work in the newest versions of Cucumber by stringifying all values (d8aa63a), then he released version 2.0.2 of FactoryGirl (1d9a3cf).

paperclip

Paperclip is our gem for uploading files to Rails apps. Some regression and infrastructural changes: Tim Cooper (coop) found that the documentation had a feature that the code didn’t, so he defaulted the :fog_public option to true (62a9f64). Trung le (joneslee85) noticed that sqlite3-ruby is now sqlite3 and fixed our dependencies to match (f815726). And Prem Sichanugrist (sikachu) continued on his testing bent by adding jruby to the mix (0f7485f, b62330a, and 1ad401a).

Speaking of testing, Chris Sepic (cgs) found that the validate_attachment_content_type matcher has allowing and rejecting methods on it, but that you must specify both. He relaxed this restriction so now you can specify either (0206259).

Today aya-soft fixed Paperclip to work in Rails 2.3.8 (e0b139d and e0b139d), then Prem Sichanugrist (sikachu) released version 2.3.16 of Paperclip (891badb).

bourbon

Phil LaPier (plapier) did more work on bourbon, the Sass gem with awesome mixins. He added fade-in and fade-out animations (46e36a2). He also updated the documentation to be explicit about browser support (3b9b58b) and also pedantically ordered the imports alphabetically (2278b58).

He then topped it all off by releasing version 0.1.2 of bourbon (1d9bac8).

flutie

Working with Phil’s on bourbon, Matt Jankowski (mjankowski) noticed that the sass-mixins gem was renamed to bourbon so he made that fix in flutie (d42e838).

clearance

Our authentication gem, clearance, got an upgraded Cucumber (89f106f) and one fewer broken Cucumber step (6b7c6e0), thanks to Chad Pytel (cpytel).