rubocop-rails VS rubocop

1) Auto-correcting a whole (large) codebase at once with tons of offenses and dozens of active branches should be used with caution. Merge conflicts, blame pollution (ok, can be solved with .git-blame-ignore-revs, though can hardly remember any project using it). Though, the most important argument is that auto-correct can introduce bugs. Unfortunately, even safe autocorrect can be unsafe. Recently, I broke one popular project (with a decent, but not 99.999% test coverage) with a single "safe" auto-correction commit 🙂 (This issue).

It's also possible to extend RuboCop through additional linters and formatters. You can build your own extensions or take advantage of existing ones if they are relevant to your project. For example, a Rails extension is available for the purpose of enforcing Rails best practices and coding conventions.

I'm still getting used to writing these. Still, this article from Evil Martians has been a big help. The rubocop-rails codebase also had some cops similar to what I wanted to put together. The cop we've put together checks if the class inherits from ActiveModel::Serializer and adds an offence to that line.

Let's take a glance at the action_filter cop real quick here, but just a quick part of it:

Following on from this, I highly recommend setting up your editor to automatically lint Ruby files with RuboCop and its Rails extension and start adapting your code to adhere to the Ruby Style Guide.

I just would like to point out that even though that is the most sane way, it comes with it owns set of problems. One of them is when developers start to code to cheat the linter, or they complicate the code just to "make the linter happy", another is when the linting rule introduces problems/errors like https://github.com/rubocop-hq/rubocop-rails/issues/418

gem "rubocop" - https://github.com/rubocop/rubocop | Set up code guidelines for your dev team, I recommend using whatever Standard recommends.

I believe if you use the `||` operator instead of `or`, then things just work out fine. I agree it is really annoying. But I am pretty sure if you use a tool like RuboCop https://github.com/rubocop/rubocop (a static code analysis tool) then it will catch bugs like this. Note that I am not recommending Ruby. But in my experience if you want to work with a language and it has a community style guide and a linter that enforces it, it will save me some heartache.

Adopt some sort of consistent formatting. Your top-level module starts off indented, seems like wasted space. May I suggest RuboCop?

By default, out of the box, RuboCop comes with a default set of pre-configured rules. The documentation will tell you Rubocop's default rules.

RuboCop is a Ruby static code analyzer (a.k.a. linter) and code formatter. Out of the box it will enforce many of the guidelines outlined in the community Ruby Style Guide. Apart from reporting the problems discovered in your code, RuboCop can also automatically fix many of them for you.

But I will encourage you to adopt Rubocop to enforce the style you want, so that if others want to contribute, they can write with spaces and then run rubocop -a and end up with the styling you prefer. Tabs indentation support was added a couple of years back: https://github.com/rubocop/rubocop/pull/7867

In my last job I encountered my first Rails codebase ever (mostly REST APIs but a few server-rendered views as well). After the initial chaotic impression of the codebase (it was a startup after all) with all the Rails magic on top, I really fell in love with the framework after a more experienced Rails dev introduced a few key conventions and helpful libraries to the codebase.

Out of those, I’d at least add the RuboCop [1] linter and the BetterSpecs [2] guidelines to this list. Both helped tremendously in eliminating bikeshedding in the team and freeing up brainpower to solve actual problems. The first one helped me learn intricacies of Ruby bit by bit right in my IDE and the latter guided us to write tests in a style that’s easy to maintain and trust.

[1] https://github.com/rubocop/rubocop

[2] https://www.betterspecs.org/

RuboCop had a setting for this but it was removed for Ruby 3 because there are valid reasons to pass a hash into a method, and linting it might break code. Here is the issue referencing the commits where it was removed, if you ever need to do this again you could just find an earlier commit.