Rails Template

Origins

This repo is forked from mattbrictson/rails-template, and has been customized to set up Rails projects the way I like them.

Description

This is the application template that I use for my Rails 6 projects. As a freelance Rails developer, I need to be able to start new projects quickly and with a good set of defaults. I've assembled this template over the years to include best-practices, tweaks, documentation, and personal preferences, while still generally adhering to the "Rails way".

For older versions of Rails, use these branches:

Requirements

This template currently works with:

Rails 6.0.x
PostgreSQL
chromedriver

Installation

Optional.

To make this the default Rails application template on your system, create a ~/.railsrc file with these contents:

-d postgresql
-m https://raw.githubusercontent.com/joshmcarthur/rails-template/master/template.rb

Usage

This template assumes you will store your project in a remote git repository (e.g. Bitbucket or GitHub) and that you will deploy to a production environment. It will prompt you for this information in order to pre-configure your app, so be ready to provide:

The git URL of your (freshly created and empty) Bitbucket/GitHub repository
The hostname of your production server

To generate a Rails application using this template, pass the -m option to rails new, like this:

rails new blog \
  -d postgresql \
  -m https://raw.githubusercontent.com/joshmcarthur/rails-template/master/template.rb

Remember that options must go after the name of the application. The only database supported by this template is postgresql.

If you’ve installed this template as your default (using ~/.railsrc as described above), then all you have to do is run:

rails new blog

If you just want to see what the template does, try running docker build . and then docker --rm -it run the resulting image. You'll be dropped into Bash and can explore the generated app in /apps/template-test. The image doesn't include PostgreSQL right now, so database operations don't work.

What does it do?

The template will perform the following steps:

Generate your application files and directories
Ensure bundler is installed
Create the development and test databases
Commit everything to git
Push the project to the remote git repository you specified

What is included?

These gems are added to the standard Rails stack

Core
- puma - application web server used for all environments
- [sidekiq][] – Redis-based job queue implementation for Active Job
Configuration
- [dotenv][] – in place of the Rails secrets.yml
Utilities
- [rubocop][] – enforces Ruby code style
Security
- [brakeman][] and [bundler-audit][] – detect security vulnerabilities
Testing
- [simplecov][] – code coverage reports
- webdrivers - auto-installs headless Chrome

Other tweaks that patch over some Rails shortcomings

A much-improved bin/setup script

How does it work?

This project works by hooking into the standard Rails [application templates][] system, with some caveats. The entry point is the [template.rb][] file in the root of this repository.

Normally, Rails only allows a single file to be specified as an application template (i.e. using the -m <URL> option). To work around this limitation, the first step this template performs is a git clone of the joshmcarthur/rails-template repository to a local temporary directory.

This temporary directory is then added to the source_paths of the Rails generator system, allowing all of its ERb templates and files to be referenced when the application template script is evaluated.

Rails generators are very lightly documented; what you’ll find is that most of the heavy lifting is done by [Thor][]. The most common methods used by this template are Thor’s copy_file, template, and gsub_file. You can dig into the well-organized and well-documented [Thor source code][thor] to learn more.

mischa-s / rails-template