We have common CSS styling in our organisation that most of the projects use. These assets (css, images etc) are included in every project's source code.
I would like to have a gem that could host these assets and the projects that use this gem would be able to directly use them. At the moment, I can only find ways to use generators and 'install' the assets into a project, not to use them from the gem itself.
The main requirement is that if there's a bug fix/ improvement made to the assets, just updating the gem should get me the latest in all projects that use the upgraded gem.
how do I go about doing this?
You can do this quite easily in rails 3.1+ if you make your gem a rails engine. Among other things if you add assets to an engine then you can require those CSS files from your application's manifest files etc.
There's a walk through on how to do this here and quite a few gems out there that wrap js/CSS packages with that exact aim of being able to upgrade the assets used without having to run generators or anything. For example the jquery-rails gem does this for jquery. A more complicated example is jquery-ui-rails, which bundles all the jquery ui js,CSS, images etc and lets you load only the jquery ui components you actually need.
Related
To include Angular in rails, I can think of three basic methods:
Use gem 'angularjs-rails' (which no one seems to do).
Download Angular, add it to /vendor and manually include it.
Use Bower to require it and then manually include.
I suppose the advantage of Bower is just the dependency model but apart from that, why would I pick any one of these over any of the other options?
A good approach is to use Rails Assets.
From their website:
Rails Assets is the frictionless proxy between Bundler and Bower.
It automatically converts the packaged components into gems that are
easily droppable into your asset pipeline and stay up to date.
I am relatively new to Rails and I have a question about serving assets from a gem vs just loading the files into the asset pipeline.
As far as I can tell, they do virtually the same thing in that they both make the files available in the asset pipeline to be called in the manifest.
What are the advantages to serving something like gem 'jquery-rails' as a gem instead of just putting /vendor/assets/javascripts/jQuery.js in the vendor assets and loading it that way?
The advantage is you don't have to add the file(s) to your repo and manage updates, you update the gem and you've updated the dependency. They can also add helpers to use the assets more easily.
Not all JS/CSS projects are out-of-the-box compatible with the asset pipeline too, so sometimes the gems will do that work for you as well.
Just because the files get served to clients doesn't make it much different than any other dependency in your application.
The gem includes the unobtrusive javascript for Rails as well as jQuery itself. It also allows you to user assert_select_jquery in tests.
jquery-rails is gem contains js file for both jquery.js, jquery_ujs.js. If you does not include jquery-rails, then you have include both jquery.js and jquery_ujs.js.If you are not using gem for jquery-rails, you have manually keep track what version jquery.js is used for jquery_ujs.js. Currently these dependency management is taken care by gem 'jquery-rails'.
Benefits:
You don't need to manually copy them when you get a new version of
jquery released, gem will make sure to add the latest codes only.
Check this link:
https://github.com/rails/jquery-rails/blob/master/lib/jquery/assert_select.rb#LC48
It provides couple of methods which helps while testing your code.
We always have ruby gem of famous javascript or css lib such as bootstrap-sass, ember-rails. But for some js lib such as bootstrap-lightbox, there are no gems sometimes. In order to manage these asset automatically, I found the jail(https://github.com/charly/jail) gem. But it seems that project is not so active now. Are there any better solution then just download and past file?
Many of those "assets gems" are just a basic skeleton with js/css assets, it should not be too hard to build your own and publish on rubygems!
An advantage of this, beside locking versions in Gemfile, is that you have control over them and don't risk screwing everything up during a bundle update.
I have found issues using external gems for managing assets, especially with bootstrap ones, sometimes the precompilation will break or they will upgrade the assets inside, breaking the entire site (or minuscole portions that you may hardly notice) with not-so-wanted changes.
The website https://wrapbootstrap.com/ has themes which were made using Twitter Bootstrap. Each of these themes include different versions of Twitter Bootstrap along with other various libraries and versions (jquery, fontawesome, etc...)
How do I add these themes to my existing Rails app? What are the steps?
I'm especially curious about the conflicts that may arrise if I'm already using a different version of jquery, twitter bootstrap, fontawesome, and others (as declared in the Gemfile).
Thank you
You can add the css from the theme you purchased from wrapbootstrap to your assets > application.css.scss file. And use the html tags that came with the theme in your rails app views so that the css styling is applied.
Also, I would recommend using gem 'sass-rails' to import the standard bootstrap styling.
Here's a tutorial to get you started with adding bootstrap to a rails app. Adding the theme css and html tags is up to you.
http://railscasts.com/episodes/328-twitter-bootstrap-basics?view=asciicast
I did this for few of the projects, I agree with majorly what Mike has answered above. Here are some of the gotchas I saw.
We started as a standard project on Rails all our views dynamic(Ember)/static were based on Bootstrap CSS. When major internal pages were up and functionality demonstrated we focused on landing pages. By this time we had the gems for bootstrap, fontawesome added to our Gemfile.
So one of the thing is to remove these gems "bootstrap", "fontawesome" from Gemfile. Include these as part of your wrapbootstrap dump.
Also as you progress with integration you may realize that a lot of common code is being repeated, its in your best interest to split the page components: headers, footers other things as partial Rails views. It severely saves the editing effort.
Another thing I found extremely useful to keep every thing up while you are still in integration stage, is to split your CSS/JS includes for pages imported from wrap bootstrap and pages you already have. So if you intend to migrate all existing pages into new theme scraping your CSS, then it can be merged in stages, otherwise you can let them co-exist.
You have to add new entries in routes.rb, controller calls to support the pages if you don't have them already. Likes of about, contactus, team etc. etc.
And if you use something like Ember/Backbone then you have to manage the co-existence of single pager app in some pages which may or may not be linked to the Wrapbootstrap pages.
This was all the things I had to take care off when I integrated the wrapbootstrap theme on top of Rails-EmberJS app.
Interesting timing as I just had to do this myself. I'm still fairly new to Rails so this might not be the best solution, but here's how I got it working ...
Note: every theme is different so this may not be a one size fits all approach.
1) My theme was built with Middleman and it was expecting to run stand alone or on a Sinatra instance.
2) In order to get the theme up on Rails, I had to add the compass gem, the sass gem, the sass-rails gem, and the compass-rails gem to work properly. I'm assuming you can install these (if required for your theme).
3) Assuming you have a Rails app ready to roll, go into your assets directory and backup your .js, .css, and all fonts and images. Place your theme asset files in the appropriate place.
4) Now do the same with your view layer. You may have a partials and/or pages folder which you can place in the views directory. You'll want to put application.erb.html and any navigation files in the layouts folder under the views directory. Again, make sure you back up your original files first.
5) If your theme was designed for Sinatra, you may have a Config.rb file. I moved the logic from this file into my config/environment.rb file. I was the least confident with this step. Other Rails devs can chime in if there is a better location.
6) Start your server up. You may encounter some exceptions but this is to be expected.
7) Take a look at your old app/assets/javascripts/application.js file and compare it to the new file. Ensure that the new file has the jquery ujs library included //= require jquery_ujs . Without this bit of magic your PUT and DELETE HTTP verbs won't work properly.
8) Path adjustments. My theme had the Font Awesome library included. In order to get it to work, I had to adjust the reference paths at the top of the font-awesome.scss file.
9) Finally, you'll need to debug the newly added code in the environment.rb file. The Sinatra developer was doing a lot of Route magic to adjust the navigation display. This wasn't porting over well to my environment. I removed many of these calls from my navigation template files. Once complete, my newly skinned app was up and running! Good luck.
make sure that while installing twitter bootstrap you should add following gem into your Gemfile under "group :assets"
gem 'therubyracer'
gem 'less-rails'
gem 'twitter-bootstrap-rails'
then run bundle command.
Now, the theme "file_name.css" (file_name could be any) that u have downloaded just add it into "stylesheets" folder under app->assests->stylesheets
then open your application.css file in same folder there you will see
*= require_tree.
replace this line with
*= require "file_name.css"
NOTE: Don't forget to re-compile your assets or simply delete the content of your tmp/cache folder.
save it and reboot your server. it will apply youe new theme.
Watch this training course which guide you to do so in detail and from scratch.
http://pluralsight.com/training/courses/TableOfContents?courseName=getting-started-aspdotnet-mvcservice-stack-bootstrap
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.