https://rails.lighthouseapp.com/projects/8994/tickets/2263-rails-232-breaks-implicit-multipart-actionmailer-tests. For now I'm just setting my emails to html, but I'm hoping to find either a monkey patch or a Rails update that fixes the issue.

It is very likely that at some point you will need to send out emails from your application. Don't cry. Gmail can do this for you. Rails 2.3.2 makes it easier than ever with the addition of 'enable_starttls_auto'. Put the following code in production.rb, development.rb or environment.rb and you 'should' be able to send out emails:

 
  ActionMailer::Base.smtp_settings = {
    :enable_starttls_auto => true,
    :address        => 'smtp.gmail.com',
    :port           => 587,
    :domain         => 'your.domain.com',
    :authentication => :plain,
    :user_name      => 'login@your.domain.com',
    :password       => 'some_password'
  }
 

If you are one of the lucky ones this will actually work. It didn't work for me but since I still needed to get email working here's what I did:

First be sure to activate the email account that you are using. To do that you only need to login. Google will walk you through entering a captcha etc.

You might get this error:
Net::SMTPAuthenticationError: 530 5.7.0 Must issue a STARTTLS command first.

If you do then check your Ruby version. Ruby 1.8.7 has this built in but Ruby 1.8.6 does not.

I'm currently running my apps on EngineYard's Solo product <a href="https://cloud-support.engineyard.com/discussions/problems/203-engineyard-cloud-support-for-ruby-187-p73">which is currently using Ruby 1.8.6 so changing versions isn't an option (not an easy option anyway).

The next best thing is to get action_mailer_tls. Most of the links you will find in forum and blog posts are broken. The code is on github and neatly packaged as a gem: http://github.com/openrain/action_mailer_tls/tree/master. Follow the directions to install and configure the plugin there and you should be able to send email.

Here's a couple of handy conversations for reference:
http://www.railsforum.com/viewtopic.php?id=28480
http://www.ruby-forum.com/topic/184137

So the next time you are building a gem and you do this:

 
    gemspec.files.include %w(
                            tasks/*
                            db/migrate/*.rb
                            app/**/**/**/*
                            config/*
                            locales/*
                            rails/*
                            test/*
                            lib/**/*
                            public/**/* )
 

and you get this:

 
undefined method `include' for []:Array

Just know that your gemspec doesn't contain any files and you don't actually need the include listed above in your Rakefile. Instead you just need to add all your files to git.

After looking at how Clearance handles tests I've decided that it's ok to embed a basic Rails application in your test directory.

The next trick is getting the gem you are working on to load in your embedded Rails application. The Clearance guys added a file in config/initializers that looks like this:

 
# This simulates loading the clearance gem, but without relying on
# vendor/gems
 
clearance_path = File.join(File.dirname(__FILE__), *%w(.. .. .. ..))
clearance_lib_path = File.join(clearance_path, "lib")
 
$LOAD_PATH.unshift(clearance_lib_path)
load File.join(clearance_path, 'rails', 'init.rb')
 

I thought that was brilliant but it didn't work for me. After messing around in the Rails code for a bit I found a bit of helpful documentation on 'plugin_locators':

The classes that handle finding the desired plugins that you‘d like to load for your application. By default it is the Rails::Plugin::FileSystemLocator which finds plugins to load in vendor/plugins. You can hook into gem location by subclassing Rails::Plugin::Locator and adding it onto the list of plugin_locators.

That sounded like the perfect solution to my problem. I figured I would simply add a plugin locator that pointed to the root of the gem I was building. Turns out that works great. In the embedded rails application inside of config/environment.rb I added this code:

 
class TestGemLocator < Rails::Plugin::Locator
  def plugins
    Rails::Plugin.new(File.join(File.dirname(__FILE__), *%w(.. .. ..)))
  end
end
 
Rails::Initializer.run do |config|
  config.time_zone = 'UTC'
  config.plugin_locators << TestGemLocator
end
 

Now my tests load correctly and all is well. Context is important. If you want to have a look at the full project I put it into a gem called disguise which you can get from github.

A copy of ApplicationController has been removed from the module tree but is still active!

Or

can’t dup NilClass

Don't go find a new job at McDonald's. Read this article and feel the love again.

In fact if you do any engine or plugin or gem development read that article. It will make you happy again.

I really like how simple it is to skin a Wordpress site so I stole borrowed some ideas.

From all of my research and effort and late night I give you disguise the ruby gem that makes it simple to skin your Rails application and impress everyone (ok maybe your mom).

Disguise makes it possible to generate a theme for your Rails website, set the current 'theme' using an admin interface or change the theme based on the current url.

Install the gem:

 
  sudo gem install disguise
 

or get the source code at:
http://github.com/jbasdf/disguise/tree/master

ActionView::MissingTemplate Exception: Missing template users/_user.erb

I was having this problem and doing a lot of cursing which is common when I stay up and write code until 2am which I know I should do and I also know that I shouldn't write really long run on sentences but I do it anyway.

This error is usually the result of some code that looks like this:

 
format.json do
  @user_html = render_to_string( :partial => 'users/user', <img src='http://www.justinball.com/wp-includes/images/smilies/icon_surprised.gif' alt=':o' class='wp-smiley' /> bject => @user )
  render :json => { :success => true,
                              :user_html => @user_html  }
end
 

The cause of this error is that the format of the current request is :json. There isn't an _user.json.erb template so Rails tries to find an _user.erb file. That doesn't exist either and boom you spend the night sounding like a sailor.

Now I don't pretend to be an expert but I have been accused of being a hack. I solve the problem by changing the template format:

 
format.json do
  @template.template_format = :html
  @user_html = render_to_string( :partial => 'users/user', <img src='http://www.justinball.com/wp-includes/images/smilies/icon_surprised.gif' alt=':o' class='wp-smiley' /> bject => @user )
  render :json => { :success => true,
                              :user_html => @user_html  }
end
 

The key is the addition of:

 
  @template.template_format = :html
 

Don't yell at me if it breaks. I'm open to better suggestions but for now this does work and now my I can find other reasons to stay up late.

Jeweler has a rake task 'rubyforge:release' that uploads your gem for you. The problem was that it would timeout and give me "Couldn't get release_id, upload failed?". I assumed that I had configured something wrong so I tried to upload the file directly to rubyforge. That didn't work either so I assumed (wrongly) that my project had something wrong with it. I was about to give up when I decided to check my gem size. It was 100MB!

Somehow I was packaging the gem inside itself on each release and it had grown into a beast. So if your release is timing out check your gem size and make sure it isn't going nuts.