Color Output with Test:Unit, AutoTest and Ruby 1.9

If you are testing using Test:Unit (rather than RSpec) and you’re using Ruby 1.9.* colorized output of your tests using Autotest will not be immediately available. Since, 1.9 comes with mini test the test/unit/ui/console/testrunner.rb script is not loaded and not available and will break your tests.

The solution is to require Test:Unit version 2.0.0 in your Gemfile, require the testrunner.rb script in test/test_helper.rb and reopen and implement the guess_color_availability method.

Then you can just run the autotest command (or bundle exec autotest) from your project directory. When you save a file your tests will be run for the file that has been changed and the results will be fully colorized!

How to Recover a Mistakenly Deleted Branch

Workflow

git checkout -b _new_branch_name
# do some work and commit changed
git checkout master
git branch -d _new_branch_name
# doh... i meant to merge first


Fortunately, you can easily recover from this mistake.

git reflog
395b1ea HEAD@{0}: checkout: moving from _master_cleanup_akismet to _master_cleanup
bd7df04 HEAD@{1}: commit: spam handling using akismet for form submissions on contact_submission and applicant models
395b1ea HEAD@{2}: checkout: moving from _master_cleanup to _master_cleanup_akismet
395b1ea HEAD@{3}: commit: cleaning up and adding some basic features
a828ef3 HEAD@{4}: checkout: moving from master to _master_cleanup

Should show you a list of commits across all branches in desc chronological order.

To merge the branch you just deleted you can give merge the sha.

git merge bd7df04

Which would match the commit at HEAD@{1}

Git Feature Branch Naming Strategy

There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things.
– Phil Karlton

Typically, we have three main branches at any given time in a project lifecycle.

master, development and staging.

Master is production ready code, development is actively being worked on and staging is pre-flight testing before deploying master.

Features are branched off of development and use underscores to indicate distance from originating branch. For instance

_development_users
__development_users_reset_password

indicates that __development_users_reset_password branched off of _development_users branch.

___development_users_reset_password_experiment

(3 underscores away) would indicate that I was experimenting with a branch off of development users reset password branch.

This provides a nice visual hierarchy when running git branch from the command line. It’s also helpful when you have multiple features being worked on by several people and you want to know where these branches are in relation to each other without needing to ask anyone. Here is a more complex example that illustrates the usefulness in using underscores in naming feature branches

  __development_people_importing_csv
* __development_people_importing_xml
  __development_users_password_reset
  _development_people_importing
  _development_users
  development
  master
  staging

Git Untrack Already Tracked Files

To remove files that are currently being tracked by git, you have to remove them from the “cache”. Note, doing this will NOT delete the file on your local machine. It will still be there but not be tracked.

 git rm -r --cached supersecretpasswords.txt 

You then need to add the file to the .gitignore file in the root of the project so that it isn’t tracked again on your next commit.

vim .gitignore
supersecretpasswords.txt

.gitignore files are tracked so remember to check in these changes.

git commit -am'my super secret passwords are safe!'

If you want to completely delete the file, on your local machine and from git

git rm supersecretpasswords.txt

If you’re working with a directory remember to add the -r flag for recursive removal!

Git: How to Delete a Branch with an Invalid Name

If you’ve named a branch beginning with two dashes “–”, you’re sort of in trouble because git interprets your branch name as a switch/flag. You can skip switches all together
by supplying two dashes before your branch name

git branch -d -- --index_for_suppliers

and your branch will be deleted!

How to Remove Your Last Git Commit

Remove your last commit (if you haven’t pushed yet)

git reset --hard HEAD~1

To see changes that have been committed and their position in HEAD

git reflog 

And to undo your previous reset and advance the cursor to the reference immediately behind the current state

git reset --hard HEAD@{1}

If you have already pushed you can

git revert HEAD

which will reverse your last commit by creating a new commit

Launch Photoshop (Or Any App) From The Command Line on Mac OS X

I often find myself coding with the terminal open. Cding around a web app project I usually end up at some point launching Photoshop. Either to touch up or work on a psd, png, jpg …etc. I fire up Photoshop and then navigate to the app’s public directory, where the site images are kept. Then begins the hunt in finder for the image. This takes some time and if I’m already at the command line it would be nice to launch Photoshop with the exact file I want with a single command! To accomplish this just make an alias in your bash profile like so…

#fire up your text editor and edit your profile
vim ~/.bash_profile
#create the alias command
alias psd="open -a /Applications/Adobe\ Photoshop\ Elements\ 3/Photoshop\ Elements\ 3.app"

You need to fire up a new terminal instance before this setting will take place. CMD+N.
Then from the command line type

psd my-image.psd

Note, I didn’t use “ps” as the alias because this is already taken by the system. Also the path to the application may be different on your system. Make sure you use the correct path or you may have an error like

LSOpenFromURLSpec() failed with error -10827 for the file...

Very Basic Git Workflow

Very, very basic git workflow

git pull
git branch dev_branch
git checkout dev_branch
#make some changes
git checkout master
git merge dev_branch
git branch -d branch_to_delete
git push