Ruby On Rails Best Practice 2020 (for us)

Alessandro — Thu, 16 Apr 2020 08:39:56 +0000

Introduction

Hi, I'm Alessandro and I'm a member of the dev team Rubynetti.
We are based on Earth, Europe, Italy, Venice; we are a team of 3.
We are 1 senior, 1 almost senior and 1 junior.

We write and maintain different web software for different companies.

Last year I wrote an article with our conventions and best practices.
This year I choose dev.to to write it down.

I hope that this gives us more feedback so we can improve our practice.

These are the conventions and references we are using this year (2020) for our projects with Ruby On Rails. Some of these references come from the past. Others are a work in progress.

1. Boring Rest

This is our big principle when we write web applications.
Boring, conventional and predictable code it's the first and most important point to make easy to maintain complex Rails application.
Became more important when writing code with a team.
From this point of view Derek Prior is our guru.

2. Frontend

We use a mix of Vue and Stimulus.
When things are easy we use stimulus.
When things are complex we use vue.
For the moment we avoid SPA and we prefer to use vue as a widget handler.
We used SPA and vue-routing only for one side-silly-project: a web card game about Venice society.

3. Test

We use the standard Rails suite test.
We use it with fixtures.
Everything very normal.
When we call external API we use VCR gem.
Our test is generally short.
We don't like and we don't use mocks and stuff like that.
Too much code to write and maintain.
We use a lot of rails short controller and model test.
Sometimes we start from a test, other times we explore the situation before and write the test after.
We like tests and we suggest everyone use it.
They save our codebase from a lot of bugs and give us confidence when we change stuff.

4. Interactors

Last year we start to use interactors.
We were in the situation of having big fat models.
A lot of concern. And this gives us headaches.
The interactors seem to use a well-structured way to resolve the issue.
Some times we use also PORO object but we like structured and conventional ways to force to write good and concise stuff.
There are different and clever alternatives.
We choose ActiveInteraction because it's easy to integrate inside Rails projects and can handle form errors.

How we use it?

When things are easy we NOT use interactors and we use standard Rails Way.
We like simple things and we like to avoid writing too much code.
Sometimes the thins became complex.
When this happens we use interactors.
Our rule is similar to the Ruby Style Guide.
We try to avoid class more length than 100 lines and methods with more than 10 lines).
We like short methods and short classes.

5. Filter and callback

We don't like and we don't use it. Sorry DHH.
It's the only thing that we don't like about Rails.
I promise.
The problem is that we think that can be very dangerous because they hide complexity and the flow of the code.
Sometimes someone can forget the callback and can generate a lot of problems with data mailer etc.
We use it only in some rare cases when the convenience is big or when we take a legacy project and refactor are too big.

6. Gems

Haml \ Slim
Pundit (we say goodbye to Cancancan because we like simple things)
Devise
Webpacker \ Vite
Ransack
Filterrific
ActiveInteraction

New features of Rails 6
We like e we use a lot 2 new features of Rails:

ActionText with Trix editor
ActiveStorage instead Paperclip (sometimes we prefer carrierwave)

Mailer organization

Params for mailers

Our best practice in the past:

Rubynetti Best Practices 2019

N.B. This document is working in progress.

DEV Community: Alessandro