I'm feeling fairly seasoned in Ruby on Rails by now, and have attempted to build my own Rails plugins. Going through that process, however, I realized that I really have not found very many good resources that clearly spell out what the conventions are for creating Rails gems/plugins, and how to efficiently accomplish some of the things that I wanted to do with my plugin.
It seems to me that the documentation for buildings Rails gems is not very good, but maybe I'm not looking in the right places. In an attempt to gain insight into how other gems are built, I've read through some of the source code of the Devise plugin for user authentication. I have found virtually nothing describing a procedure similar to how Devise injects its own methods into an existing model, even though this seems like it may be a very useful thing for a lot of good gems to do.
My question is this: Where should I go to learn how to build good Rails gems? Are there spelled out conventions for how to do certain things?
The currently popular method to do what you are trying to achieve is to use Engines. Engines basically let you mount one application inside another, allowing you to do anything from add a method or two, to adding a complete blog. The official guides have a very nice step-by-step guide to getting started, and there are many good unofficial guides, as well. An engine basically consists of a little bit of initialization code, the application code, and a dummy application for testing and development. It might look intimidating, at first, but it's much easier than it sounds, at first. Good luck
Here is the most modern approach to gem crafting with Bundler:
bundle gem your_gem
cd your_gem
edit your_gem.gemspec and add description, summary and optional website.
Add required gems such as rspec to the Gemfile.
rspec --init
touch spec/your_gem_spec.rb
Write good tests.
Add your code to lib/your_gem.rb.
When you're finished its time to build and push to rubygems.org:
gem build your_gem.gemspec
gem push your_gem-0.0.1.gem
And thats it. Next time you make a change be sure to change the version number in version.rb.
see below link that will help you how to build a good rails gem
Making a Gem
Related
I'm creating a discussion board system that I will use on many different websites. It uses:
models
controllers
views
assets
Instead of manually copying and pasting these again into each site's project, what's the best way to convert this into something that would allow fixing or adding features in one place and all the site would get the update to the discussion board.
Would converting this into a gem be the way to go? I've never created a gem before so not sure how to go about it. A requirement would be to keep the gem private.
You could create a Rails plugin, called a Rails Engine and distribute it as a gem.
Gems don't necessarily need to be published on https://rubygems.org, you can also setup your own rubygems server or just reference the gem from Git in your project's Gemfile.
How to write a Rails Engine is way to broad to be reasonably answered on Stack Overflow. You can find a basic guide on how to write engines on http://guides.rubyonrails.org. You could start from there and have a look at existing engines (e.g. Spree).
I see a lot of people asking about Blog Engines, but most of the questions & answers are rather old. Or if they aren't old most of the projects are old. I'm wondering if anyone knows of any Blog Engines that currently support Rails 3.1 or are at least being actively developed to support Rails 3.1.
I would also be interested in seeing any sample applications or blog posts written for Rails 3.1 Blogs. I am going to be adding a blog to one of my websites, and would prefer to simply use a Rails Engine or sample code if there are any good ones out there. I hate reinventing the wheel. Looking for something simple, and not too opinionated so I can modify easily to suit my own needs.
you might want to check out Refinery http://refinerycms.com/engines
doesn't look like they are 3.1 yet, but probably soon
https://github.com/resolve/refinerycms-blog
Your best bet would probably be to use Typo.
Typo is currently using rails 3.0.9. Rails 3.1.0 is still a release candidate so I don't know of any blogging apps using it right now. If you must use rails 3.1.0 then you may have luck grabbing the gem for 3.1.0.rc4 (the newest version) and using typo anyway. Chances are everything will still work.
Hope this helps.
Perhaps Enki is a good fit, currently at Rails 3.0 but there is a github branch with Rails 3.1 support.
http://www.enkiblog.com/
Interestingly BrowserCMS was recently made to be a mountable engine: https://github.com/browsermedia/browsercms/commit/6098699fed2e3dbd65815ac3a5ce0dd6acc103d2
Seem to have a bit of time and experience behind them. More akin to Concrete5 with an inline front end / in context editing facility for users, which can be a real plus.
Im looking into this now and Im getting to conclusion that the best way to do this would be mounting a rack-app(like sinatra) into your rails app, there's various basic sinatra blogs in github to start or copy, not to mention this is fully customizable and I guess very light-weight.. engines will likely have dependencies and may also break when updating gems, a rack app won`t
I wasn't able to find any satisfying solution with engines
other stuff I found:
mounting a rails app inside a rails app: http://blog.dynamic50.com/2010/02/22/rails-3-0-mount-multiple-apps-as-engines/ feels a bit weird(heavy?), but you could mount a fully featured app like enki...
http://planscope.io/blog/2012/03/08/mounting-a-blog-within-a-rails-3-application/ this blogpost talks about using Toto, it seems pretty nice, easy and simple... but the project is not being maintained and it doesn't seem to be able to support a lot of features...
I dunno about using git to post, it makes it really simple but I dunno if I'd like having non-code stuff in my commits
Monologue https://github.com/jipiboily/monologue . From their web:
It is a barebone blog engine for Rails. It is built as a Rails engine and with a focus on keeping very few dependencies to ease it's use in your project. You can also use monologue-markdown which will replace the default editor with a simple Markdown editor.
Seems like pretty active development also.
Some ruby gems like jekyll, toto and webby offer out of the box blog-type integration into your ruby app. Another way of developing a rich web blog-type application is to build and model the application yourself using pure ruby and rails practices. (e.g creating an Article and User model). The first offers out of the box features the 2nd option offers more customization and control.
In people's experience on Stack Overflow, which would be the best route and what would people consider when making the decision to use a gem out of the box versus going alone?
All of the gems you mentioned take static, markdown/textile/etc files and turn them into HTML websites. They take different approaches to it, with jekyll spitting out the finished website for hosting, toto doing the converting and routing on request, and webby doing the same as jekyll mostly.
If you're using Rails, it's important to note that none of these will integrate into your application well. They're built to more-or-less operate on their own.
Generally speaking, if a gem has the functionality you need, use it. They are not equivalent to plugins you find for Wordpress and Drupal where they are typically low-quality, buggy, poorly documented, etc. More often than not, gems simply add a couple modules that you can integrate into your application how you like.
On the other hand, a basic blog is pretty quick and simple in Rails, especially considering you've got a handy walkthrough guide straight from the Rails documentation on how to do it.
If you're new to Rails and want tight integration with your app, it's probably best to bake your own blog features.
This will take some time to do, but its worth it to learn how things really work.
If you're more seasoned, just look at the gem's API and documentation and decide if it does what you want it to do and if you're comfortable with how to integrate it. If so, it'll save you time.
One other consideration: who will be using the blog? Is it for internal use, and programmers will be the ones updating it? If that's the case, then you can make it very easy by not worrying about a lot of aesthetic polish in the back-end. Conversely, if you're making an app that includes a blogging component for the general public you might want it to feel more polished. In this case a gem might save you a lot of time.
It depends on your application.
I have a Rails 2.3 application which I would like to extract into a plugin, or engine. The application has user authentication, and basic cms capabilities supported by ancestry plugin.
I want to extract the logic for the application into a plugin/engine so that I can use this code for future projects, with a different "skin" or "theme" if required.
I'm not entirely sure I actually understand the difference between plugin and engine concepts, so that would be a good first point.
What is the best approach, are there any good starting points, links, explanations, examples that I should follow. Also, with the release of R3 to consider, is there anything that I should be aware of for that, with regards to plugins etc.
I am going to start off by watching Ryan's http://railscasts.com/episodes/149-rails-engines
but obviously thats over a year old now, so one of the challenges I'm faced with is finding the most up to date and relevant information on this subject.
All tips and help gratefully received.
Actually, converting an application is pretty straigtforward. Just create a plugin-folder, put an app-folder inside containing all yor model-views-controllers folders, and that's it.
You will have to manage your migrations yourself though. Also you have to define rake-tasks to copy files to your public folder. I think the railscasts is still pretty up-to-date, if anything it is now easier in rails 2.3.
Good luck!
[EDIT: for rails3] Rails 3 engines are very clean and powerful. Check this gist by Jose Valim.
You will probably be better off focusing your engine on Rails 3, as opposed to trying to make it compatible for Rails 2 and Rails 3, due to the backwards incompatible changes. Here is a more up to date tutorial for Rails 3
also the book "Crafting Rails applications" by Rails Core member Jose Valim, has a good chapter on it. Int he shows how to use his tool EngineX which generates a Rails 3 engine structure, so you can more easily create engines for your Rails 3 projects. His gem devise is also a rails engine which is also nice, because you can easily customize it by copying the templates into the application directory, and allowing you to subclass the controllers that you want to customize more.
Writing a plugin is an entirely different process than writing an app, if you already have your app code it should be straightforward converting it into a plugin.
Consider that if you use third-party plugins in your app it could get pretty messy.
Anyone have a list of rails plugins that are both stable and give you enough functionality to be worth the extra effort of supporting?
Edit:
I am mostly interested in the best, most complete list of plugins so I can use it the next I'm starting a rails app. I don't currently need a particular plugin.
You can use bort as reference
Plugins Installed
Bort comes with a few commonly used
plugins installed and already setup.
RESTful Authentication
RESTful Authentication is already
setup. The routes are setup, along
with the mailers and observers.
Forgotten password comes setup, so you
don’t have to mess around setting it
up with every project.
The AASM plugin comes pre-installed.
RESTful Authentication is also setup
to use user activation.
User Roles
Bort now comes with Role Requirement
by Tim Harper. A default admin role is
predefined along with a default admin
user. See the migrations for the admin
login details.
Open ID Authentication
Bort, as of 0.3, has Open ID
integrated with RESTful
Authentication. Rejoice!
Will Paginate
We use will_paginate in pretty much
every project we use, so Bort comes
with it pre-installed.
Rspec & Rspec-rails
You should be testing your code, so
Bort comes with Rspec and Rspec-rails
already installed so you’re ready to
roll.
Exception Notifier
You don’t want your applications to
crash and burn so Exception Notifier
is already installed to let you know
when everything goes to shit.
Asset Packager
Packages up your css/javascript so
you’re not sending 143 files down to
the user at the same time. Reduces
load times and saves you bandwidth.
p/s: agree with #eric, specifics
restful_authentication for sign in, sign out, sign up.
paperclip for file uploads.
rspec and shoulda for testing.
Could you be more specific in what you are looking for? There are so many great plugins for so many different tasks, it's hard to guess the right ones for you.
Try resource_controller. http://jamesgolick.com/2007/10/19/introducing-resource_controller-focus-on-what-makes-your-controller-special
It seriously dries up your RESTful controllers. And is the only plausible way of implementing polymorphic actions that I've come across.
Loads of other good stuff too. Give it a try.
I can imagine why you are asking that. I used to work in a project with more than 20 plugins in use. Sure, it speeded up the development early on, but later debugging became difficult. Also, updating to a new version of Rails was a lengthy process.
My advice is that don't start using a plugin before have a reasonable understanding of how it works and of the trade-offs involved. For small plugins you should probably read the source code. For larger ones, see what other people are saying about them, when the plugin was updated the last time, etc.
For scanning popular plugins, see the most popular github projects. Quite a few of them are Rails plugins.
For me, Haml is excellent. It's not for everyone but if it clicks with you you'll love it. Set aside 30 min and give it a shot. It reduces the clutter in my views by about 50%.
It's easy to install using Rails 2.1+'s gem dependencies :
# environment.rb
config.gem 'haml'
Then:
rake gems:install
Ruby Trends is a good place to check what the most popular plugins/gems/books/practices are. It's like StackOverflow (i.e., voting plugins up/down) but is more fine-grained and has the ability to search/filter.
I my rails time I used http://github.com/mbleigh/acts-as-taggable-on/tree/master with success.