Robby on Rails

I wanted to publically thank everyone for helping me get Oh My Zsh out there and continue to improve it. Many of us spend a lot of time in our terminals throughout the day and I firmly believe that having a well-working shell is nearly as important as having a well-working texteditor.

While Oh My Zsh isn’t a large project, it is my attempt to share what I’ve learned about using zsh with others… but honestly, my goal is to learn from you. I don’t have a lot of time to really dive into the deepend of the zsh-pool so am relying on others to share their tricks, hacks, functions, themes, etc. So, I thought that if I created a basic framework with outlined some conventions so that others could contribute, that perhaps I’d end up with a kickass shell.

So far… Oh My Zsh has been forked on github 25 times and is being watched by over 100 people.

Last week, I pushed out an update that introduces an auto-update feature. I’m quite keen of desktop applications that can auto-update themselves, so our initial version of this feature will ask you no more than once a week if you want to check for updates. This means that as we continue to extend and improve Oh My Zsh, you can keep up-to-date.

It’s the beginning of a new month… are you still using Bash? Perhaps you’re using your own zsh configuration but want to see what else zsh can offer you? I invite you to install Oh My Zsh today. :-)

Just run this in your terminal and you’ll get setup. Don’t worry… you won’t lose your existing configuration. :-)

wget http://github.com/robbyrussell/oh-my-zsh/raw/master/tools/install.sh -O - | sh

For more infromation, visit http://github.com/robbyrussell/oh-my-zsh/

Inspired by some recent posts from Tom on zsh, I decided that I’d do my part to help people give it a whirl. I’ve been using zsh for a few years now and haven’t found myself missing bash.

If you’re interested in taking a few minutes to give zsh a while, you’re in luck. I recently reorganized all of my zsh config into a package and tossed it on github to share. My goal was to create a reusable tool that would allow people to get up and running quickly with some of the fun configuration that I’ve come to rely on on a daily basis.

For example:

• Auto-complete rake and capistrano tasks
• Git branch names when you’re in a git project directory structure
• Tons of color highlighting (grep, git, etc.)
• Sexy prompts.. (so say me)
• much much more…

I invite you to give Oh My Zsh a whirl, which should take you less than a minute. Just follow the instructions.

Also, Oh My Zsh is Snow Leopard compatible. ;-)

A quick follow-up to a post from a few months ago on how our team has a naming convention for git branches when we’re working on Lighthouse tickets (read previous post).

I’ve just put together a quick git hook for commit-msg, which will automatically amend the commit message with the current ticket number when you’re following the branch naming conventions described here.

Just toss this gist into .git/hooks/commit-msg.

  #!/bin/sh

  #
  # Will append the current Lighthouse ticket number to the commit message automatically
  # when you use the LH_* branch naming convention.
  #
  # Drop into .git/hooks/commit-msg
  # chmod +x .git/hooks/commit-msg

  exec < /dev/tty

  commit_message=$1
  ref=$(git symbolic-ref HEAD 2> /dev/null) || return
  branch=${ref#refs/heads/}

  if [[ $branch =~ LH_(.*) ]]
  then
  lighthouse_ticket=${BASH_REMATCH[1]}

    echo "What is the state of ticket #${lighthouse_ticket}? " 
    echo "(o)pen " 
    echo "(h)old" 
    echo "(r)esolved" 
    echo "Enter the current state for #${lighthouse_ticket}: (o)" 

    state="open" 

    read state_selection

    case $state_selection in
      "o" )
        state="open" 
        ;;
      "h" )
        state="hold" 
        ;;
      "r" )
        state="resolved" 
        ;;
    esac
  echo >&2 "[#${lighthouse_ticket} state:${state}]" >> "$1" 
    exit 0
  fi

Then a quick example of how this works…

  ➜  bin git:(LH_9912 ♻ ) git ci -m "another test" 
  What is the state of this ticket? 
  (o)pen 
  (h)old
  (r)esolved
  Enter the current state: (o)
  h
  Created commit 1ed2713: another test
   1 files changed, 3 insertions(+), 1 deletions(-)

Now to see this in action… (screenshot)

Then we’ll check out the git log really quick.

➜  bin git:(LH_9912) git log
commit 1ed271323c4a054fe56e76bddc9ac81d241a1032
Author: Robby Russell <robby@planetargon.com>
Date:   Mon Feb 16 12:06:33 2009 -0800

    another test
    [#9912 state:hold]

Thanks to Andy for helping me figure out how to read user input during a git hook.

Zsh versus Bash. Fight!

...because we need another religious war in the developer community. ;-)

(skitch via Gary)

I asked on twitter but only got a small handful of responses. So, I’m taking it here.

Show me yours and I’ll show you mine. Your terminal prompt that you’re using. Inspire me with new ideas for my prompt.

Here is mine.

Now… show me yours.

If you previously followed my article, Installing Ruby on Rails and PostgreSQL on OS X, second edition and are now upgrading to OS X Leopard, you’ll want to make a few adjustments to your setup.

First of all, it’s great that Apple has decided to provide Ruby on Rails out of the box.

~ > gem list rails                                                                                                                                                                   
  *** LOCAL GEMS ***

  rails (1.2.3)
      Web-application framework with template engine, control-flow layer,
      and ORM.

How many gems does it come with?

~ > gem list|grep '^[a-z]'|wc -l                                                                                                                                                     
      29

It’s really great that Apple shipped Leopard pre-installed with 29 gems, especially if you don’t have your entire Rails stack setup already. In my case and for those that have followed my installation process, you don’t need to switch over to this new development stack (yet). I have a lot of time invested in my fully-functionaly MacPorts installation process (PostgreSQL, MySQL, RMagick, Subversion, Git, etc. Since this all working fine on my machine, I’m not ready to make the switch to Apple’s installation.

Don’t Fix it… if it’s not broken!

So, the the first thing that I did was modify my PATH environment variable, which has /usr/bin as the first path that it’ll look at when you try to run commands like ruby, mongrel_rails, gem, etc. You’ll want to modify this and prepend /opt/local/bin: to the front of PATH in your shell configuration. If you’re using bash, this would be… ~/.bashrc. If you’re using zshell like me, ~/.zshrc.

Now, when you start a new Terminal and run gem list, you’ll see all of the gems that you already have installed.

~ > gem list rails                                                                                                                                   < new-host

*** LOCAL GEMS ***

rails (1.2.5, 1.2.4, 1.2.3, 1.1.6)
    Web-application framework with template engine, control-flow layer,
    and ORM.

Back to my happy gems…

~ > gem list|grep '^[a-z]'|wc -l                                                                                                                                                              < new-host
      72

Great! Now I can get back to work and spend time playing with the new features in Finder, Mail.app, and iChat instead of installing all of the software dependencies that our development projects have. :-)