Category Software Engineering

Introduction In this tutorial, we’ll cover how to do integration tests in Rails using Minitest and Capybara. We’ll also cover how integration tests can sometimes serve as a replacement for controller tests. Prerequisites To follow this tutorial, you’ll need to have Ruby installed along with Rails. This tutorial was tested using Ruby version 2.3.3, Rails […]

Introduction Testing is a double-edged sword. On one hand, having a solid test suite makes code easier to refactor, and gives confidence that it works the way it should. On the other hand, tests must be written and maintained. They have a cost, like any other code. In a magical world, we could write our […]

As 2016 is approaching its end, it’s time to look back and see what we’ve accomplished this year. Our team of Semaphore developers, community writers and editors are big on learning new things and sharing knowledge, so we made sure to publish at least one new tutorial or article on BDD, testing tools, automating DevOps […]

Post originally published on David Pell. Republished with author’s permission. Chef Guards The great thing about the major Chef resources (file, directory, package, etc.) is that they’re idempotent, meaning that they will produce the same effect if executed more than once. Chef takes care of this under the hood. If, however, you find yourself needing […]

Introduction Most websites we use provide an HTTP API to enable developers to access their data from their own applications. For developers utilizing the API, this usually involves making some HTTP requests to the service, and using the responses in their applications. However, this may get tedious since you have to write HTTP requests for […]

Deploying your services packaged in lightweight Docker images has many practical benefits. In a container, your service usually comes with all the dependencies it needs to run, it's isolated from the rest of the system, and deployment is as simple as running a docker run command on the target system.

Introduction Over the past few years, Go has developed into the language of choice for many types of applications. Its popularity can be attributed to several factors, out of which its testing story is a prominent one. Out of the box, Go comes with a great package for testing. This tutorial will explain how you […]

Growth always has its challenges. With more developers, there are more ongoing projects, branches and CI builds. And sometimes while you work, you find yourself wanting to know what else is in the pipeline on Semaphore.

As in earlier reports on other languages (see Ruby, Node.js, Python), today we’re sharing data from Semaphore about usage distribution across versions of PHP in active private projects.

Introduction This is the second tutorial in our series on testing React and Redux applications. If you haven’t read the first part, we encourage you to do so. Redux is a library for managing state in React applications. Since the code using Redux is composed of many small pieces, it’s very easy to test it. […]

If there is an Elixir library function that needs to be called, how can we be sure that all possible errors coming from it will be captured? Elixir/Erlang vs. Mainstream Languages Elixir is an unusual language because it functions as a kind of a wrapper around another language. It utilizes Erlang and its rock solid […]

In this tutorial, we’ll introduce you to Packer and its use cases. It covers using Packer to build an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) and deploying the application to AWS with a load balancer and autoscaling group. Prerequisites This tutorial involves a few mandatory tools and assumes a few things. You’ll need the following to complete […]

Introduction In this tutorial, we will learn how to run a Java Play application as a Docker container. Docker is a software containerization platform. It uses containers instead of hypervisors for a number of reasons. First of all, containers are lightweight and they have a lower memory footprint. Secondly, containers virtualize the operating system while […]

In October we shared data on which versions of Ruby and Node.js developers use to get the job done. Next up is a report on Python, for which the main question is binary — is it Python 2 or 3 that developers use at work today?