I am trying to use Spree with my RoR application. Ok, I do follow all those guides and FAQs on official website when I want to customize something. That's ok and no problem with it. One question, to which I could not find a clue -- how is that possible, that there is nothing in apps/view, apps/models folders, but it's still working? I mean, yes, I can create something in these folders and redefine the behavior of my views (actually, this is one of the ways of customization), but I really want to understand the internals. I am pretty new to Rails and got used to classic app folder structure.
what you are wondering about is the magic of Rails Engines.
Ruby on Rails allows you to define Engines (your app is one too) and when it looks for views/controllers/etc.. all mounted engines are part of the search path.
So the view is inside the Spree gem, not visible to you - but it still looks in there.
If you put something in your view folder with the same name, it will take precedence over the views in the Rails engine you have in the Gem.
Here is a good guide on how Engines work in Rails:
http://edgeguides.rubyonrails.org/engines.html
One good example of these Engines is the jQuery-rails Gem you probably use inside your Application.
It has no code at all (except for some fallbacks for Rails 3.0 and below that don't have an asset pipeline), but the jQuery.js file in the app/assets/javascripts folder. And since the engine is in the load path you can require the asset that's in there..
The engine itself has the same folder structure as your app (app/views, app/controllers ...)
You can look at the internal structure of Spree here: https://github.com/spree/spree/tree/master/core/app
Related
I have a rails application that is kind of similar to the active_admin gem. I want to make this existing application into a gem.
I know that you can generate a gem with:
bundler gem gem_name_here
This command creates an empty gem. Which is fine I suppose, I just don't know where to put all my code.
You're ostensibly supposed to put all of your code in the /lib directory. However, my application has an assets pipeline and an app directory with all my models, controllers, and views. I don't know where to place all of these directories in the gem. Any thoughts or ideas?
If you need me to share any code, I'll gladly share it.
You're describing a rails engine. Engine is a miniature rails application that can be used inside other rails app. For more details see official rails guide
I'm new to both Ruby on Rails and Locomotive CMS, but I'm just starting to create my first site with them.
I've got the engine running in a full Rails app (I'm going to need to deploy it on our own server later on). But it's just spitting out the 'Template' content defined through the admin interface, without any other template/content around it.
I can 'fix' it by shoving the html for the whole page in through this input field. But that's not right, surely? The Getting Started guide talks of putting the templates in the filesystem, at something like: Pages/index/first page. "All pages are inherited from index". I have an index.liquid under views/pages but it's not picking that up... (I've tried a couple of other locations too).
I'm sure this is a dumb question, but please could someone tell me where to put my template in the file system? Or how to point Locomotive to pick it up from the right place?
(I did get the file system liquid template working by defining it through the Rails way, with a route, a controller and adding a liquid template initializer I found here. But then it's missing the variables that should come from the CMS content).
I'm loading the site using bundle exec unicorn_rails. And I'm using Rails v3.2.13, Ruby v1.9.3 and Locomotive_cms v2.2.2.
Thanks!
I'm Didier from LocomotiveCMS.
LocomotiveCMS is a little bit different from the other CMS, in a sense, we offer a tool named Wagon to manage your site locally without having to install mongodb, rails and some other components.
Another huge benefit is that you can write your templates in HAML and your CSS in SASS/ SCSS or Less (we embedded Compass as well) and with our preferred texts editor (editing a whole site in a browser is a nightmare).
That's a nice eco-system in order to be super efficient when it comes to develop a LocomotiveCMS site.
Once you're done with your local work, you can deploy your site to a remote LocomotiveCMS engine in a similar way you push your application to Heroku. Actually, pushing a site will create the back-office for the final end user.
I suggest you to read that page.
http://doc.locomotivecms.com/guides/get-started/requirements
and this one too
http://www.locomotivecms.com/tour
Our message is still not clear on our official website but believe me, we are working to make it better.
Hope it will help you !
Didier
I've got a simple rails gem (created using bundler) and I'd like to extend it by adding some CSS and javascript functionality. However, I'm unsure how to go about this and where to add the files. In particular, I need need more information on how it all fits together with the asset pipeline once it gets included in another project.
Can anyone give me the lowdown on how this works and either provide some simple examples or link to a tutorial? Literally 1 css and 1 js file is all I'm looking to include. Thanks.
You could write the gem as an engine. This allows you to have an app folder in the gem just as any Rails application would have. You can add models, views, controllers, assets etc.
Once you have it set up it's quite intuitive and it's a familiar way to create a gem if you're used to creating Rails apps.
This should get you started:
http://coding.smashingmagazine.com/2011/06/23/a-guide-to-starting-your-own-rails-engine-gem/
Unfortunately official guide for creating Rails plugins is outdated: http://guides.rubyonrails.org/plugins.html and I didn't find any good tutorial for creating engines only this code: https://github.com/mankind/Rails-3-engine-example and enginex https://github.com/josevalim/enginex were helpful.
So... what are differences between plugins and engines in Rails 3? (I'm thinking of plugins and engines with controllers and views)?
And how can I create plugin with views and controllers? Or maybe in Rails 3 it's better to use engines? Can I use main app model (for example user model, logged user information) inside my engine?
Engines are just required as gems in your app. Since Rails 3.1 you even don't have to require their assets such as .css or .js
In Rails 2.x, Engines didn't exist, so plugins enabled people to have these functionalities but all code was copied inside the app.
According to the Ruby on Rails 2.3 Release Notes...
if your plugin has an app folder, then app/[models|controllers|helpers] will automatically be added to the Rails load path. Engines also support adding view paths now, and ActionMailer as well as Action View will use views from engines and other plugins.
There is supposed to be some way to make Rails aware of the app/views of your Rails engine, in 2.3. However, there is virtually no documentation on how this feature really works, that I can seem to find.
Can anyone help me get my view paths working from the context of a Rails Engine scenario?
IMPORTANT: The big issue is not with views as much as it is with partials. I need to be able to load partials from the view path of a rails engine.
Thanks!!
Turns out, I just needed to restart. This is done automatically by virtue of me defining a proper views directory within the nested app.
Durr!