I don't know if this is a ridiculous question however I am creating a website with RefineryCMS, Ruby, and Rails. I chose to speed up some things by using Twitter's Bootstrap via the less-rails-bootstrap gem. I do however need to customize some colors and such though I can't seem to locate any of the less files. I looked in the logs and see references to things such as 'twitter/bootstrap.css' though I'm not able to locate this or where the less files live.
Where are these things? Else, how to do you override the defaults?
When you complete with gem install and bundle install command , you should :
rails g bootstrap:install
This will insert some files in your app/assets dir , including bootstrap_and_overrides.css.less in app/assets/stylesheets.
You can learn more in this Railscast.
UPDATE: (Jan 25 2014): Valuable information form the comment of #Niels Abildgaard:
According to GitHub repository of less-rails-bootstrap gem, Rails generator command shoud be :
rails generate less_rails_bootstrap:custom_bootstrap
Related
I am using a gem that somebody else wrote to serve the fabric javascript library. The gem is using an old version of the library (1.3) and I'd like to be using 1.4 (the latest version). I haven't found any other gems using this version. My question is, is this the best way to load assets, or is there a more preferred method? And, if so, how would I go about building this gem with the latest version of this library?
In my opinion, it is good to do so in most cases.
In your situation, depending on how much time you have, you may want to do one of the following:
1. Contribute to the gem
If the gem is open source, you may fork it, update to the newest version, and do a pull request.
By this way you also give contribution to the rails whole and the others who are facing the same problem as well.
Downside is this takes time. You have to wait for the author to accept the pull request and wait for the next version of the gem. But you can point your Gemfile to use your forked version until the new version is out ;)
2. Write your own gem
Writing a gem for rails providing assets is actually not difficult. You may follow other existing gem's structure and should be easy to understand.
A good example is https://github.com/rails/jquery-rails
Downside is you have to maintain the gem. Otherwise when fabric 1.5 is out, another one would ask the same question as yours again.
3. Put the assets in your vendor directory
Rails project by default do have a vendor directory. It's ok to put external assets here as well.
The above are my preferred way to manage external assets.
So I have this idea for a RubyGem that I think would be an awesome experience to learn more about Ruby and Rails but...I have no idea where to start.
My idea is to generate a folder "articles" where you can put markdown files. From this folder the main blog page displays only the titles as links to the articles themselves.
It sounds simple but I honestly have no idea where to start. What articles do you recommend I read if I want to insert lines into routes.rb, generate a folder and display markdown in Rails?
I would recommend one of these tutorials for gem creation:
http://net.tutsplus.com/tutorials/ruby/gem-creation-with-bundler/
http://railscasts.com/episodes/245-new-gem-with-bundler
To modify the routes.rb file, you'll just need File.open to read lines in. Use regular expressions to determine where you want to insert your line, and write the file back out.
To create a folder, look at the documentation for Dir.new
For Markdown in Ruby/Rails, I like the rdiscount gem: https://github.com/rtomayko/rdiscount
Railties provide a nice way to do certain things like this. You'll probably use http://api.rubyonrails.org quite a bit. There is some Railtie documentation on that site here: http://api.rubyonrails.org/classes/Rails/Railtie.html.
I recommend reading the RubyGems guides – especially What is a gem?, Make your own gem and Patterns.
Since you're likely already using Bundler, you can run bundle gem <name> to generate a gem project with stuff already in place. It does save work, but refer to the guides if there's something you don't understand.
Also, watch some open source projects on GitHub – observing other developers and taking note of how they do things certainly helps.
The simplest way is probably to read other gems that do anything similar to what you want to accomplish. Start with their .gemspec files that will list all the other files which are needed for the gem to work, and a list of gem dependencies.
Responding more to how to get started with creating gems, the following are 2 popular, documented gems that can help you.
https://github.com/seattlerb/hoe
https://github.com/technicalpickles/jeweler
Also, though it does more than you're trying to do with your gem (it's a static site generator), https://github.com/mojombo/jekyll is a very popular gem which you place .markdown files into a posts/ directory which are converted to static HTML pages via rake. I would imagine you could find at least some functionality you're after there.
I am upgrading Ruby on Rails from 3.1 to 3.2.2 and I would like to know what I should make and at what I should be care in order to properly move my vendor plugin (note: it is not a gem and at this time I am not planning to make that a gem) from the directory /vendor to /lib as well as wrote in the official documentation:
Rails 3.2 deprecates vendor/plugins and Rails 4.0 will remove them completely. You can start replacing these plugins by extracting them as gems and adding them in your Gemfile. If you choose not to make them gems, you can move them into, say, lib/my_plugin/* and add an appropriate initializer in config/initializers/my_plugin.rb.
I refer mostly to the "an appropriate initializer in config/initializers/my_plugin.rb": What code should I put in that file?
More: Do you have some advice or alert on making the above process?
The initializer should contain the appropriate requires and other startup related tasks that are necessary for your plugin to work correctly. It's difficult to help you without real code examples from your app but this link should help you get started.
http://code.coneybeare.net/how-to-convert-simple-rails-23-style-plugins
The example in the link requires the plugin (now in the lib directory) and adds a module to ActiveRecord::Base.
Hi there im working on a new rails app and i just started to use Foundation.
I did the installation using
rails g foundation:install
Everything is working as espected (i mean by that i can see the css in my source code, and also the visual effect of it ;p)
I just dont understand how to override the defaults proprieties of Zurb Foundation...
I saw online that im supposed to edit some foundation.css or app.css but here doesnt seems to be any file like that in my Application folder....
I did the installation by editing the gemfile then a bundle install.
cheers
and yes it works if you do your overrides on the app/assets/stylesheets/application.css
But it's better if you do it in the app/assets/stylesheets/foundation_and_overrides.scss,
also at the top of the file, there's a bunch of lines commented, with those lines you can also modify some attributes!
Option 1: Since you installed it through bundler (assuming you used something like gem 'zurb-foundation'), you won't have any files that you can edit directly. You can override and style as usual by editing app/assets/stylesheets/application.css or adding new files within the directory. I'd recommend this over modifying Zurb so you can continue receiving the benefits of being able to upgrade to newer versions of Zurb in the future without dealing with a mess.
Option 2: If you feel that you need more control over the customization and you aren't worried about the above pitfalls, you can clone/download foundation-rails and copy the files in vendor/assets to your own Rails directory of the same name. Remove zurb-foundation from your Gemfile, rebundle, and you should be able to modify the assets directly in your own project.
Option 3: Check out foundation-sass and give Compass a try. I haven't looked into it much but you should have some amount of customization through mixins.
I have features I would like to be portable between my own Rails applications.
I wonder if I should create a gem or a plugin for each feature I want to be portable (sharable).
They are just for Rails (for now) because they include css, html, js and image files.
But I have been wondering, the things provided with plugins could be provided with gems too but not the opposite? So maybe it's better to learn how to create gems, because then you I don't have to learn how to create both gems and plugins? And gems seem to be more popular these days.
But then, from what I can understand one gem is shared between all rails app in the OS. So that means I can not customize it for each Rails app right? In that case, maybe creating a plugin is better cause it should be allowed to customize (editing css, js etc) each feature and to have it stored inside the Rails app itself and not in the OS level.
Some advices would be appreciated!
UPDATE:
So gem works great with css, html, js and image files? In a plugin I think you can have a MVC, your own models, views and controllers. Quoted from Rails guides "Storing models, views, controllers, helpers and even other plugins in your plugins". Is this possible too in a gem? Eg. I want to add a extension that gives me a nice Shopping cart (with own migrations, mvc, asset files) that will be hooked into the current Rails app. Is this possible as gem or only as plugin?
You're right that gems offer a little more than plugins. Versioning and dependencies on other gems being the main ones for me.
One gem needn't be shared across everything using ruby. You can install multiple versions of a single gem and specify in your environment.rb that a gem requires a specific version. E.g.
config.gem 'my-gem', :version => '1.2.3'
Also you can freeze gems into your rails application so that you know you are working with a specific version.
You might want to look at the jeweler gem which makes creating your own gems easier.
UPDATE
To include CSS, javascript etc I think you'll need to make an Rails engine which can then be bundled as a plugin or a gem. I've not done this but there's some coverage here and here.
The push with Rails 3 seems to be towards gems and away from plugins as a lot of support has been added to make gems work as well or better than plugins ever did. A well constructed gem is a great thing to have and share between different applications, and also reduces the amount of testing you will have to do since you can test the gem thoroughly before integration.
For extensions to Rails that use CSS, HTML and other assets, it might be that you need to build an engine to bundle this all up and allow it to fit neatly into an application.
As of Rails 4, plugins will no longer be supported.
Gems are the way forward.