Today I have had to test a specifical IP based feature. Simply put, I get the user IP and store it into the database.

The simple rails way to get a visitor IP address is

request.remote_ip

If you do this while developing you’ll usually get a predictable

127.0.0.1

How do I test that my controller puts a correct IP in the database?
At first I thought about creating a mock request object. But this way I would be testing only the saving portion of the method, not the part detecting the IP. In other words, I needed to simulate an IP address at a lower layer.

Webrat to the rescue! Thanks to the nice folks at the webrat irc channel I got an answer. Simply:

header('REMOTE_ADDR', ip_address)

The Webrat headermethod lets you set all the header variable of you session. Handy, isn’t it?

ActionMailer::Base.smtp_settings = {
  :enable_starttls_auto => true,
  :address => "smtp.gmail.com",
  :port => 587,
  :domain => "your-google-apps-domain",
  :authentication => :plain,
  :user_name => "username",
  :password => "password"
}

The most important line is enable_starttls_auto => true.

Unlike pre 2.2 Rails, no plugin is required. Not sure this setup works with Rails 2.2 though, never tried it.

Via this forum discussion.

The plugin is fantastic, but there was a small glitch with Rails 2.2, which forbade to upload files. Files upload is an ajaxed action, so you won’t see any error, unless you use firebug, which revealed this problem:

undefined method 'relative_url_root'

After some googling I found this patch which anyway is for the fckeditor plugin. So I tweaked it a bit and here’s the working patch for easy-fckeditor:

app/controllers/fckeditor_controller.rb

198

uploaded = request.relative_url_root.to_s + "#{UPLOAD_FOLDER}/#{params[:Type]}"

becomes:

198

uploaded = ActionController::Base.relative_url_root.to_s+"#{UPLOAD_FOLDER}/#{params[:Type]}"

lib/fckeditor.rb

38

js_path = "#{controller.relative_url_root}/javascripts"

becomes:

38

js_path = "#{ActionController::Base.relative_url_root}/javascripts"

There was another small glitch, due to the interaction with safe_erb.
safe_erb is a super useful plugin which raises an error whenever unsanitized output is printed. This way you never risk forgetting to sanitize your stuff. The problem here is that html text is necessarily not sanitized, otherwise all the html tags would be lost. The trick here is to tell ruby that he can trust those strings. It’s not the most secure solution, but I guess it’s better to have everything but the html text sanitized than nothing…

libfckeditor.rb

15

value = value.nil? ? "" : value

becomes:

15

value = value.nil? ? "" : value.untaint()

I sent this patches to Gaston Ramos, the plugin maintainer, but you can follow my code if you stumble into this issues before the patches integration.

Davide