Week 4 - CircuitVerse@GSOC'23

This week was interesting and frustrating at the same time. The maximum time went to explore solutions and resolving the issues with specific library packages. This time everything does not go as planned.

The scheduled task for this week was

Write RBS Annotations for the codebase

RBS

What is RBS?

RBS is a type annotation system introduced in the Ruby programming language. Its purpose is to bring static typing capabilities to Ruby code. We can verify the type signature by using various tools like [steep, rbs, etc.]

RBS is released officially by Ruby.

Interesting Features

Type Safety: RBS helps catch type-related errors early, improving code reliability.
Tooling Support: Static type information enables advanced code editors to offer autocompletion and accurate error detection, enhancing developer productivity.
Documentation and Readability: RBS annotations serve as documentation, making code easier to understand and maintain.

Setup

Install rbs_rails gem
```
  gem install rbs_rails
```
Generate tasks
```
  bin/rails g rbs_rails:install
```
Run this to generate the rbs collection configuration file
```
  bundle exec rbs collection init
```
Now simply run this to download the required gem's rbs file
```
  bundle exec rbs collection install
```
We are going to use steep gem to type checking
So, install steep gem
```
  bundle install steep
```

Create Steepfile with this configuration

  target :app do
    signature "sig"
  end

As per the configuration, it will check sig folder for our writer rbs annotation files for our codebase

Issues

But one problem with RBS is -> As it's fairly new to the market, there is not much support for RBS in all the libraries. So we face various issues regarding that.

In our case, while using rbs validate it was throwing RBS::DuplicatedMethodDefinitionError due to conflicting rbs code of meta-tags and activesupport gem.

After searching for various solutions and taking suggestions from the maintainer, the final solution to fix the issue was -

Add meta-tags gem to ignore the list of rbs collection configurations like

  gems:
    # Skip loading rbs gem's RBS.
    # It's unnecessary if you don't use rbs as a library.
    - name: rbs
      ignore: true
    - name: steep
      ignore: true

Copy the rbs file of meta-tags gem
Modify them to remove duplicate definition issue
And then copy-paste those files in sig/vendor/meta-tags folder

References -

Discussion Thread for the issue - https://github.com/ruby/rbs/issues/1359

PR - https://github.com/CircuitVerse/CircuitVerse/pull/3807/

Undercover CI

Undercover is a great tool to analyze untested code of a commit and do PR reviews.

SimpleCov is mainly used to generate the test details and undercover analyze the generated Lcov file.

Setup SimpleCov to generate the Lcov file

Install simplecov and simplecov-lcov gem to :test group

In the config/environments/test.rb file, paste this configuration file at the top

  require "simplecov"
  require "simplecov-lcov"
  SimpleCov::Formatter::LcovFormatter.config.report_with_single_file = true
  SimpleCov.formatter = SimpleCov::Formatter::LcovFormatter
  SimpleCov.start do
    add_filter(/^\/spec\//) # For RSpec, use `test` for MiniTest
    enable_coverage(:branch)
  end

Now we need to load all the code beforehand for this analysis
So, mark config.eager_load = true in configuration of test environment
Now when we run our test suite, it will generate lcov file under coverage/lcov/<project_name>.lcov file.

Now, We need to setup undercover CI for PR review

The first and easier option is to use https://undercover-ci.com/ which has simple steps for installation. But the issue here is , it's paid for organization

So,we keep searching and found a opensource project undercover-checkstyle which can review the PR by using undercover CLI tool and use reviewdog to do the PR Review

For this, add undercover-checkstyle gem under :test group in Gemfile

In the CI workflow add this configuration

- uses: aki77/delete-pr-comments-action@v1
  with:
   token: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}
   bodyContains: "[undercover]"
   noReply: "true"
- name: Run reviewdog
  env:
    REVIEWDOG_GITHUB_API_TOKEN: ${{ secrets.github_token }}
  run: |
    git fetch --no-tags
    reviewdog -reporter=github-pr-review -runners=undercover --fail-on-error