Find your notes within your Rails app

Leaving TODOS and other notes sometimes feels like throwing trash onto a pile which you may never come back to.

You can find all notes you’ve left inside a Rails using rails notes.

This will search app, config, db, lib, and test directories for FIXME, OPTIMIZE, and TODO annotations.

Running rails notes will return something like:

app/actions/auth/creates_new_user_from_open_id_payload.rb:
  * [22] [TODO] Find a way to create users linked to accounts?
  * [27] [TODO] Not using these right now, and they should move to the tokens model

You can see that we receive a list of notes including the file, line number and the note.

You can also filter for specific notes with --annotations. For example let’s filter FIXMEs:

rails notes --annotations FIXME

You can also add custom notes in the Rails config like this:

config.annotations.register_tags("DEPRECATEME", "TESTME")

Adding your own custom notes could be handy when you want to add a note for something like gem/app upgrades in code which might not be tested particularly well, or just difficult to test in general.