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Rails

Using Action Policy for a Ruby on Rails App: The Basics

To keep your app secure, you need to control who and what can access it. Access control can be categorized into authentication — "who" to allow — and authorization — "what" they can access. Authentication is a subject for another day, but when it comes to user authorization, you generally have two ways to go about it: using a role-based or resource-based strategy. In this two-part series, we'll take a deep dive into using the Action Policy gem for a Ruby on Rails blog application.

An Introduction to LiteStack for Ruby on Rails

In this series of posts, we will look at LiteStack, a one-stop-shop solution that hosts and processes all your production data on a single machine. LiteStack (as the name suggests) makes use of SQLite to provide: In this first post, we'll introduce the basics of LiteStack and set up an example Rails application. Let's begin!

An Introduction to Sidekiq for Ruby on Rails

Sidekiq allows Ruby developers to maintain fast and responsive web applications by moving time-consuming tasks into the background. With multithreading at its core, Sidekiq can process many jobs at once. This makes Sidekiq an important part of Ruby or Rails applications that handle heavy loads or perform tasks like sending emails or processing files.

An Introduction to Devise for Ruby on Rails

With over 20,000 GitHub stars and lots of integrations, the Devise gem is one of the most popular gems in the Ruby landscape. So why would we term it one of Ruby's "hidden" gems? Well, as popular as it is, most developers only scratch the surface of the library's capabilities. In this two-part series, we'll take a deep dive into Devise. In this first part, we'll learn some of the basics, including: In part two, we'll look at more advanced usages of Devise, including: Let's get started!

Exceptional Error Reporting for Rails Exceptions

If you want insights into your application's exceptions but don't have time to invest in adding verbose logic to your code, we've got some exceptional news: The AppSignal for Ruby gem 3.4.1 now supports the Rails error reporter! With this change, you can simplify your AppSignal integration, streamline your code and begin reporting errors on the fly without raising an error page and interrupting your user's flow.

Setting Up Business Logic with DCI in Rails

In our last post, we examined the most common ways to organize business logic in Ruby on Rails. They all have advantages and drawbacks, and essentially, most do not leverage the full power of Object Oriented Programming in Ruby. This time, we will introduce another alternative that more naturally fits the mental models we apply when reasoning about the behavior of our applications: DCI.