The best CI/CD Blog by Semaphore

Rails Testing Antipatterns: Models

This is the second post in the series about antipatterns in testing Rails applications. See part 1 for thoughts related to fixtures and factories. Creating records when building would also work It is common sense to say that with plain ActiveRecord or a factory library you can both create and only instantiate new records. However, […]

Marko Anastasov

Rails Testing Antipatterns: Fixtures and Factories

In the upcoming series of posts, we’ll explore some common antipatterns in writing tests for Rails applications. The presented opinions come from our experience in building web applications with Rails (we’ve been doing it since 2007) and is biased towards using RSpec and Cucumber. Developers working with other technologies will probably benefit from reading as […]

Thiago Araújo Silva

Working Effectively with Data Factories Using FactoryBot

This tutorial has been updated by Thiago Araújo Silva on 20 April 2018. Introduction In test-driven development, data is one of the requirements for a successful and thorough test. In order to be able to test all use cases of a given method, object or feature, you need to be able to define multiple sets […]

Lies, Damn Lies, and the State of Testing in Rails

Ruby on Rails was the first major web framework to include automated tests as part of every new project. The effects have been enormously positive. Many developers have learned to write tests well, which in turn helped them get better at design. Experienced developers were drawn by Rails’ focus on productivity and beautiful code. Their […]

Marko Anastasov

Rails Testing Handbook: A Free Ebook to Help You Build Better Apps

Bugs and messy code slow down development, and can make complex projects fail. We write code with good intentions, but in practice as complexity increases we need a system to help us avoid problems. This is where BDD (Behavior-driven Development) can make a huge difference: it provides us with a sustainable process for continuously producing […]

Marko Anastasov

How to Deploy Rails Applications With Ansible, Capistrano and Semaphore

Introduction In this tutorial, we’ll cover how to create a server with Amazon Web Services, do configuration management with Ansible, deploy Rails applications with Capistrano, and how to do continuous integration with Semaphore. All the code from this tutorial is available in a repository on GitHub. If you get stuck, you can always compare it […]

Heidar Bernhardsson

PhantomJS Is Dead, Use Chrome Headless in Continuous Integration

If you’ve been using PhantomJS for continuous integration, please switch to Headless Chrome. Semaphore provides recent versions of both Chrome and chromedriver preinstalled out of the box.

Marko Anastasov

How Kajabi Got to a 10-minute CI Build for 100k Lines of Rails Code

This is a guest post by Brendon Murphy, CTO at Kajabi. Read it to find out how Kajabi got to a 10-minute CI build for 100k lines of Rails code and got rid of tedious manual test suite balancing with Semaphore Boosters, fully automated parallel CI for Rails. Kajabi is a SaaS company positioned squarely […]

Testing Middleware in Laravel with PHPUnit

Introduction In this tutorial, we will show you how to test middleware in Laravel applications. If you are not familiar with the concept of middleware, it acts as a middle man between a request and a response. It’s a type of filtering mechanism. Using the AuthMiddleware in Laravel as an example, users who are not […]

Christopher Vundi

Easier Secrets Management Through the Semaphore UI

Manually adding shared environment variables and configuration files between projects can be time consuming and error prone, especially for organizations with many projects. Secrets are a way of storing and grouping that sensitive data. Semaphore now allows you to create and manage secrets through the UI.

On Building a React Native CLI

In the Developer Interview series, we talk to engineers who use Semaphore. We pick their brains about how they work, what wisdom they would like to pass on, and the most challenging problems they’ve faced during development. This time around, we had the pleasure to talk to Gant Laborde, a member of the Ignite team […]

7 Ways Continuous Delivery Helps Build a Culture of Learning

At the heart of continuous delivery is a fast feedback loop that immediately shows developers the effects of their work. Mistakes are found and fixed quickly, while beneficial changes can be released and deployed to customers without having to wait for a distant future release date. This rapid feedback helps build an organizational culture of […]

Marko Anastasov

Our 2018 Internal Hackathon: Things Built and Problems Solved

Just like last year, the team behind Semaphore took 2 days off from our usual jobs and went on to work on the things that excite us, but are not part of our day-to-day work. Read on to find out about the things we’ve built and problems solved over these two days.

How par8o Sped up Rails CI Builds 8x with Semaphore Boosters

Read it to discover how par8o reduced build time from over 2 hours to 13 minutes with Semaphore Boosters, fully automated parallel CI for Rails.

Updating Services in a Docker Swarm Mode Cluster

In this series of tutorials, we’ve seen how to establish a Docker Swarm cluster, schedule services to the cluster’s nodes, and make those services consumable from within and outside the cluster. Deploying services, however, is not necessarily a one-time activity. Things change, and there needs to be a mechanism for updating services, after they’ve initially […]

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