My first open source rails plugin: SafeDevEmail

I just finished up the initial version of my first open source rails plugin. It is a fairly simple plugin which allows you to configure an email address that will receive all emails sent from your rails app while it is in development mode.

The plugin is available at code.google.com/p/safedevemail/.

To get started all you need to do is drop the plugin in your vendor/plugins directory and edit your mailserver settings in evironment.rb

Config Examples:

SMTP

ActionMailer::Base.smtp_settings = {
 :address  => "smtp.example.com",
 :port  => 25,
 :domain  => "www.mywebsite.com",
 :dev_mailto => "developer@mywebsite.com"
}

Sendmail

ActionMailer::Base.sendmail_settings = {
 :dev_mailto => "developer@mywebsite.com"
}

Lazy Migrations

I was working on americanwinery.com and one of my coworkers asked me about a model that they hadn't seen before. Turns out it was from the early days of the site and it was never even used in production. It was a great candidate for a little code cleanup, so I removed the model and tests and started in on the migration to remove the table.

When I write migrations I generally make a point of making them reversible, so as I was looking for the original migration to copy the structure of the table I thought it would be much easier to just call the "up" from the original migration in the "down" of the migration I was working on. It was an interesting thought, turns out it is pretty easy to do.

For example, lets say you have a migration that creates a table named articles and it looks something like this:

class CreateArticles < ActiveRecord::Migration
  def self.up
    create_table :articles do |t|
      t.text :title, :body
      t.timestamps
    end
  end

  def self.down
    drop_table :articles
  end
end

A few days/months/years later you realize that you don't use that table and you decide to write a migration to get rid of it, here is what I would suggest:

class DropArticles < ActiveRecord::Migration
  def self.up
    CreateArticles.migrate("down")
  end

  def self.down
    CreateArticles.migrate("up")
  end
end

That is all there is to it. If you want to do a little more reading on this subject you can check out the API documentation (http://api.rubyonrails.org/classes/ActiveRecord/Migration.html)