I want to reuse some controllers, models, stylesheets, images and views in upcoming projects. How is it possible in Rails 3, to have these be standard components, when I create a new project (rails new $project) ?
Generally you would use the same OO principals used in other languages and applications. You can use version control to keep the files in sync if there isolated. However if they are spread about the project you should look into Rails Engines. However you are going to run into a lot of headaches if your code is non orthogonal.
Extract them into Engine or Gems. Structure stylesheets, images in assets. It's not only possible it in fact the standard solution to do. Read some gems to learn this (Devise, kaminari, to name a few).
Related
Is there any way to package your code by feature in rails? I would like to structure my project so that each feature has its controllers, jobs, mailers, layouts and helpers in its own folder. e.g.
app
----user
--------jobs
--------controllers
--------mailers
--------layouts
--------helpers
----company
--------jobs
--------controllers
--------mailers
--------layouts
--------helpers
where user and company are seperate features.
I've done this in my app and its pretty easy.
You create your file structure the way you want it and then you just put config.autoload_paths += %W(#{config.root}/app/user/jobs) or whatever other subdirectory you want into your application.rb folder.
People might say this is not the rails way but I feel your pain when your project gets really big and hard to navigate.
Checkout Trailblazer gem. It is an extension on the basic MVC pattern.
Every time I create a new Rails application, and for the admin part, I copy the layout and assets from another project to the new project.
I think it's obvious how many problems this approach causes. I am thinking about organizing my layout, and assets in a proper way.
What I have in mind is creating a gem and putting everything in that gem. But before I try that, I wonder if there is a better way for organizing these files?
Gem is good if you want to share codes among apps.
If, like your case, the shared parts have routes/views, an engine would be better suited, which is also a kind of gem. You can check the guide for details: http://guides.rubyonrails.org/engines.html
There's every chance I've approached this entirely in the wrong way which might be why I'm struggling to find an answer, as is typically the way with Rails.
For clarity, I'm referring to the -m option of "rails new", eg.
rails new [new-project] -m [this is where my template goes]
I've created a project/application template to speed up the creation of a specific project type, with the view that further projects/products will have their own template also.
The template adds in the relevant gems and does a bit of housework to tidy up the output of the gem installation (moving JS/CSS files to /vendors, for example) as well as copying over a generator that gives the option to expand the project further.
I'm struggling to understand if there is a way to test that the project template is working as expected and copying the correct files.
Have I approached this in the correct manner, and is there a way to test project/application templates?
Edit - Further research is suggesting that an Engine may be a better solution. Is that accurate?
A Rails Engine is a way to package some application or application subset so that it is easy to share with other applications. Basically, if you have some models and controllers that can be shared by multiple applications, you can use an Engine. This sounds a lot like what you described as a project template. Engines can be packaged as gems, gems can automatically behave as Engines, include rake tasks, hook into Rails initialization, and more, so why not take advantage of Other People's Work if you can?
I wanted to try out Angularjs. However, I have been trouble deciding on where I should located my angular app.
I am using Rails framework for the backend. I have seen tutorials where the entire angular app lives under the assets/javascript folder.
I was wondering if instead of living within the assets/javascript folder, I could make it live outside my rails directory entirely. That way, I can potentially separate my backend and front end entirely. (Is this recommended?).
I believe the asset pipeline also precompiles a lot of the assets. If I were to separate out the angularjs asset, would I need to precompile the assets somehow?
Thanks
I've been working through a similar set of questions. There are some good tools that allow you to integrate AngularJS directly into your rails asset pipeline, and they to me look good if you want just a little bit of Angular.
However, if you want a full Angular front-end, aka a single page web app, I think you'll eventually be limited by compatibility and some of the tooling. I feel like the Rails gems won't quite keep up with Angular, and so you'll be into version conflicts. I've also seen more and more tooling for Angular as a standalone, and I very much like the ng-boilerplate project template. I also like much of the testing tooling such as karma, and I haven't really sorted out a way to integrate karma with rails.
For that reason, I eventually decided that I'd keep the two separate. Initially, I did that through creating a rails application and a separate angular application (separate directories). I used ng-boilerplate as the framework for the angular end. I wrote a tutorial on that. This eventually got a bit frustrating, and I wrote some more thoughts on it, the main annoyance was that I had two git repositories and it was annoying to keep them in synch. It's also sort of annoying working with an IDE across two directories. I've ended up shifting to rails and angular being in the same folder, and they seem to play nice, as each uses different directories within that project.
In this current structure, I'm using the grunt setup that came with ng-boilerplate to minify all the code, package it and also run karma unit testing. I haven't yet nailed the end-to-end testing, but it's on my list. I've found this to be a relatively productive work environment. My chosen structure for my pages, controllers and karma test cases has some repeated code (I'm choosing not to factor it out to maintain readability). I'm planning to extend the rails scaffold generator to create the javascript framework for me - so when I create a persons rails scaffold, it will also create a persons angularjs scaffold for me. I'll update here if and when I do that work.
EDIT: I've completed the scaffolding work as well, which allows rails to automatically generate the angularJS elements when you generate the rails models/controllers etc. The blog post is here: http://technpol.wordpress.com/2013/09/24/rails-generator-to-generate-angular-views/
You could use a grunt based workflow:
How to manage AngularJS workflow with lots of script files
http://newtriks.com/2013/06/11/automating-angularjs-with-yeoman-grunt-and-bower/
If you start with a decoupled frontend, use mocks at first so you can stay within angular and not lose focus switching between backend and frontend logic. An advantage of building a single page application is that you can develop it independently of the backend api. See (http://docs.angularjs.org/api/ngMockE2E.$httpBackend) for information about mocking http responses.
We have been using AngularJS with our Rails application, in a way where we have been using Rails ERB templates, but switch over to using ng directive as and when required.
For this above setup we have used bower/bower-rails gem, which lets us use bower to manage the angular packages and their dependencies. We commit this into our repo, in the javascripts directory, and is taken care of by the Rails asset pipeline.
This setup has worked well for us considering we have above 50-50 % split of our views between the ERB templates and Angularjs.
More about this setup in the links below:
http://angular-rails.com/bootstrap.html
http://pete-hamilton.co.uk/2013/07/13/angularjs-and-rails-with-bower/
http://start.jcolemorrison.com/setting-up-an-angularjs-and-rails-4-1-project/
There are many advantages of separating out your api service (rails in this case) and your frontend components. As we do for ios/android apps, angular client can live on its own as a separate entity. It will be a static website that can be deployed on s3 or any static website host. It just needs to communicate with your api service. You could setup CORS to make it possible.
Some advantages of this workflow
You could use rails-api, which is a subset of rails application. If you are just going to use rails to build apis, it doesnt make sense to have all functionality that a complete rails app provides. Its lightweight, faster and inclined more towards building API first arch than a MVC arch.
You could use yeoman angular-generator to generate an angular app and make the most of grunt & bower to manage build (concat,uglify,cdnify etc) and dependencies (angular modules).
Deployments will become flexible. You won't need to depend on one to push the other.
If you ever plan to change your backend stack (eg rails to play/revel), you would not need to worry about your client components.
By splitting the development of the frontend and the Rails backend you could distribute the work over two development teams and keep the application as a whole very extensible.
There is also one downside to this approach.
By having the applications in two separate repositories, you can’t easily have a full integration test. So you will have to test the apps separately. You could mock your apis to test angular app.
We have been using this approach and would recommend others the same.
Less dependency & more productivity.
I have been doing UI research and have come across admin templates at http://themeforest.net/. I was wondering how do you apply these onto a web app built on Rails. These templates look very similar to wordpress themes. Are they that easy to configure? Is it just as simple as setting up a link to the database to make the fields form capture data? I've been looking at this theme.
For admin templates I recommend using Active Admin. It's relatively easy to implement and gives you great admin screens with little effort.
Yes, You can. I'm trying to solve the same problem and so far I have a couple options:
1.) do it by hand, I've done this before, it works but takes a lot of time to truly understand how your theme is put together. First I would recommend using the included themes assets exactly as they are bundled with the theme. Don't assume that just because you have twitter-bootstrap-rails gem that the bootstrap classes in the theme will work. Link the assets statically and slowly extract out the static assets and replace them in the asset pipeline once you know they work.
2.) Use the strategy suggested in the install_theme gem (http://drnicwilliams.com/2009/10/06/install-any-html-themetemplate-into-your-rails-app/) the gem itself is not maintained any longer (i'm not sure about any forks), but the strategy is sound. Extract the core parts of the template into partials.
The short answer is yes, but there is no straight forward way to "import to rails"