When I build Rails applications I find myself doing the same things over and over again. This includes adding the same gems/plugins, configuration info and custom initializers, rake tasks etc... etc....
This can't be a good thing.
So, is there a way to package all this repetitive code into some sort of project template ... so that I can do a "rails myapp" and have everything good to go from there?
Btw, running 2.3.5 if that matters :)
thanks
App templates is probably the feature you are looking for.
Many people just create the "template" and then commit it to a repository, possibly on GitHub, for easy access later. I personally find that this works really well.
Related
I'm currently researching how I can create a standard rails project with some custom functionality as the basis for my next projects.
I know there are some tools for templating (http://guides.rubyonrails.org/rails_application_templates.html) a project but I don't know if they will suffice as I want to keep updating the template project with new stuff.
What are the ways to achieve this? Will git be the solution (rebase the new functionality) or is there anything else that is easier to manage?
Can you give more information on what you're trying to achieve? You're a bit vague to be honest.
I don't see why templating wouldn't work
You could combine it with a generator, installed through a simple gem you've created that's defined in a Gemfile somewhere
remove_file 'Gemfile'
copy_file '/path/to/Gemfile', 'Gemfile'
run "bundle install"
generate("your_generator:install")
We have a website using Rails 2.3.x, bundler, nginx, passenger and git, and would now like to use the same code to deploy a very similar site. Differences between the two will include:
Locale
Databases
Validations in some cases
Views in some cases
What is the best way to manage these differences while using the same code base?
Some ideas we've had:
Create new Rails environments, such as production-a and production-b and handle differences in the appropriate environment files. One potential problem is that many gems and plugins are hardcoded to look for production or development environments.
Use Passenger to set a global variable or use the domain per request to determine which context to use. The problem with this are rake tasks, cron jobs, etc that would not have access to this state.
Maintain two versions of the config directory. This would be inconvenient maintaining 2 versions of all the config file, many of which would be identical. Also, I'm now sure how to leverage git to do this correctly.
Any ideas, tips, or examples would be greatly appreciated! Question #6753275 is related but seems incomplete.
One solution I have used in a rails 2.3.x project was to convert the entire site to an engine. That actually is pretty easy, create a folder under vendor\plugins\ and move all the app stuff there. You can see an explanation for rails 2.3 here.
If needed you can even move all migrations and stuff there as well, and use a rake task
to run those.
Everything that needs to be overruled can then just be placed in the actual rails project using the engine. So you would have two rails-projects, with their own configuration, locales and some local overrules, and one big shared plugin/engine.
We used git submodules to keep the code in sync over different projects.
In rails 3 this is even easier, since the engine can now just be a gem.
Hope this helps.
Maven Archetypes are handy ways to get a project up and going in no time flat. Rails is kinda like an archetype in and of itself. However, I'm curious to know if there are any Rails equivalents for Maven Archetypes.
For example, I want to create an Archetype with full authentication already built in via Authlogic. With Maven Archetypes I would need to build a project with it already ready to go, create my archetype and start working back parameterizing things that should be parameterized. Then anyone can make a Rails project with Authlogic set up by filling out a few questions during the archetype generate command and boom! Fully functional Rails app with Authlogic built in.
Is there a Rails Equivalent? Are Generators expected to do this? Is this just not Rails-y?
I think that rails app templates are the most similar thing to Maven Archetypes. http://railscasts.com/episodes/148-app-templates-in-rails-2-3 is a good starting point to get an opinion about them.
Perhaps you are looking for Modules and Mixins?
I'm not sure but rails casts might have something else to add.
I want to get into rails by examining well built code
where can i find typical open source rails project that i can download
and learn from ?
i'm interested in facebook connect integration (facebooker), tag clouds, searching in
my website
I'm not looking not tutorials or screen casts
Thanks!
This question gives a good list
a list of projects with good test-suites
a list of open source rails apps to learn from
Have a browse of ruby tool box and download some open source. For example there's refinery and zena, two content management systems and Rboard, a forum. Depends what you want really but there's plenty out there. Ruby toolbox entries are ordered by github watchers and forks to give you an idea of their popularity.
I really like looking at the commits in teambox.
I find it a bit more complicated. But there's also spree.
There's also devise which is really interesting to look at too.
Finally, I'd recommend you to follow the rails commits (it's the only commits feed I have in my Google Reader).
Gady, this is an extremely rich topic you're asking about and resources are all over the internet. Try starting at http://rubyonrails.org/.
You should be able to find tens of questions just like yours (asked and answered) by searching SO at the top bar.
For Rails, part of it is the building process, so one feasible approach is to read a tutorial like http://railstutorial.org/book
then when in Chapter 2, you will use Scaffold, and at that time, you will have some basic code to look into how a basic Rails app is.
I also suggest you use source control like Git, Mercurial, or SVN to commit different phases of the project, from creating the rails project and then after each step, so you can diff what the changes are during each step.
If you already have Ruby 1.9.2, Rails 3.0.1, and sqlite3, then you can
rails new myproj
cd myproj
rails generate scaffold foo name:string salary:integer gpa:float note:text
rake db:migrate
rails server
and now you can use http://localhost:3000/foos to create, display, update, delete the foo records, and have quite a bit of source code to look at. Most of the customizable code is in app, with css and javascript in the public folder.
Ryan Bates has an excellent series of videos.
http://railscasts.com/
An extremely valuable resource.
Radiant is a CMS that you can download for free and see how it works. It is a great piece of code to look at and see how it works.
I guess that most open source Rails projects are shared on Github, so it may be interesting to browse its Ruby section and look for most watched or most forked projects:
http://github.com/languages/Ruby
Steady stream of new interesting projects to take a look at :)
And don't forget the official:
guides.rubyonrails.org
well there is one "bigger" project on github, waiting for downloading and contribution...
but it's a little controversial because of the security issued they have (had?)
It's still worth a look:
http://github.com/diaspora/diaspora
I'm starting research on what I'd need in order to build a user-level plugin system (like Wordpress plugins) for a Rails app, so I'd appreciate some general pointers/advice. By user-level plugin I mean a package a user can extract into a folder and have it show up on an admin interface, allowing them to add some extra configuration and then activate it.
What is the best way to go about doing this? Is there any other opensource project that does this already? What does Rails itself already offer for programmer-level plugins that could be leveraged? Any Rails plugins that could help me with this?
A plugin would have to be able to:
run its own migrations (with this? it's undocumented)
have access to my models (plugins already do)
have entry points for adding content to views (can be done with content_for and yield)
replace entire views or partials (how?)
provide its own admin and user-facing views (how?)
create its own routes (or maybe just announce its presence and let me create the routes for it, to avoid plugins stepping on each other's toes)
Anything else I'm missing?
Also, is there a way to limit which tables/actions the plugin has access to concerning migrations and models, and also limit their access to routes (maybe letting them include, but not remove routes)?
P.S.: I'll try to keep this updated, compiling stuff I figure out and relevant answers so as to have a sort of guide for others.
You might want to check out mephisto, it's a blogging software built with ruby on rails and has add-on plugin support. Not sure if it works how you are thinking of, but might give you some good insights. The source can be found on GitHub.
You should look at deface gem. It allows to customize rails views, adding content via hooks and replacing whole views/partials. Spree is using this gem so you can look also at spree. Beside views they also have other solutions for customizing application so you can find more answers to your questions.