Must have gems for development machine in ruby on rails

Rubygems are the best thing that happened in ruby on rails. So today here is my list of gems in development group that helps to make things faster or sometimes bring simplicity to the development process

  gem "better_errors"
  gem "binding_of_caller"
  gem 'annotate'
  gem 'bullet'
  gem 'debugger'
  gem 'flay'
  gem 'hirb'
  gem 'localtunnel'
  gem 'lol_dba'
  gem 'mailcatcher'
  gem 'meta_request','0.2.1'
  gem 'pry'
  gem 'pry-doc'
  gem 'quiet_assets'
  gem 'rack-mini-profiler'
  gem 'railroady'
  gem 'rails-footnotes', '>= 3.7.5.rc4'
  gem 'rails_best_practices'
  gem 'reek'
  gem 'request-log-analyzer'
  gem 'smusher'
  gem 'zeus' # don't add this in your gemfile.

What they do:

better_errors:

Better Errors replaces the standard Rails error page with a much better and more useful error page. It is also usable outside of Rails in any Rack app as Rack middleware. If you would like to use Better Errors’ advanced features (REPL, local/instance variable inspection, pretty stack frame names), you need to add the binding_of_caller

Better errors Screenshot

annotate

Will generate a schema of the model on the top of the model. Something like this.

  # == Schema Info
  #
  # Table name: line_items
  #
  #  id                  :integer(11)    not null, primary key
  #  quantity            :integer(11)    not null
  #  product_id          :integer(11)    not null
  #  unit_price          :float
  #  order_id            :integer(11)
  #

 class LineItem < ActiveRecord::Base
   belongs_to :product

bullet:

The Bullet gem is designed to help you increase your application’s performance by reducing the number of queries it makes. It will watch your queries while you develop your application and notify you when you should add eager loading (N+1 queries), when you’re using eager loading that isn’t necessary and when you should use the counter cache. Best practice is to use Bullet in development mode or custom mode (staging, profile, etc.). The last thing you want is your clients getting alerts about how lazy you are.

debugger

Best debugger for your rails application.

flay

Flay analyzes code for structural similarities. Differences in literal values, variable, class, method names, whitespace, programming style, braces vs do/end etc are all ignored. Making this totally rad.

hirb:

A mini view framework for console/irb that’s easy to use, even while under its influence. Console goodies include a no-wrap table, auto-pager, tree, and menu. A console gem that will display your results something like this:

  >> Tag.last
  +-----+-------------------------+-------------+---------------+-----------+-----------+-------+
  | id  | created_at              | description | name          | namespace | predicate | value |
  +-----+-------------------------+-------------+---------------+-----------+-----------+-------+
  | 907 | 2009-03-06 21:10:41 UTC |             | gem:tags=yaml | gem       | tags      | yaml  |
  +-----+-------------------------+-------------+---------------+-----------+-----------+-------+
  1 row in set

localtunnel

Localtunnel lets you expose a local web server to the public Internet. For example, running a web server on port 8000 on your laptop can be made public with::

  $ localtunnel-beta 8000
   Port 8000 is now accessible from http://8fde2c.v2.localtunnel.com ...

lol_dba:

lol_dba is a small package of rake tasks that scan your application models and displays a list of columns that probably should be indexed. Also, it can generate .sql migration scripts.

mailcatcher:

MailCatcher runs a super simple SMTP server which catches any message sent to it to display in a web interface. Run mail catcher, set your favorite app to deliver to smtp://127.0.0.1:1025 instead of your default SMTP server, then check out http://127.0.0.1:1080 to see the mail that’s arrived so far.

mailcatcher

meta_request

RailsPanel is a Chrome extension for Rails development that will end your tailing of development.log. Have all information about your Rails app requests in the browser - in the Developer Tools panel. Provides insight to db/rendering/total times, parameter list, rendered views and more.

RailsPanel