Suspenders

Suspenders is the base Rails application used at thoughtbot.

Installation

First install the suspenders gem:

gem install suspenders

Then run:

suspenders projectname

This will create a Rails 4.0 app in projectname.

By default this script creates a new git repository. See below if you want to use it against an existing repo.

Gemfile

To see the latest and greatest gems, look at Suspenders' templates/Gemfile_clean, which will be appended to the default generated projectname/Gemfile.

It includes application gems like:

Airbrake for exception notification
Bourbon for Sass mixins
Delayed Job for background processing
Email Validator for email validation
Flutie for page_title and body_class view helpers
High Voltage for static pages
jQuery Rails for jQuery
Neat for semantic grids
Postgres for access to the Postgres database
Rack Timeout to abort requests that are taking too long
Recipient Interceptor to avoid accidentally sending emails to real people from staging
Simple Form for form markup and style
Unicorn to serve HTTP requests

And gems only for staging and production like:

New Relic RPM for monitoring performance
Rails 12 Factor to making running Rails 4 apps easier on Heroku

And testing gems like:

Capybara and Capybara Webkit for integration testing
Factory Girl for test data
RSpec for unit testing
RSpec Mocks for stubbing and spying
Shoulda Matchers for common RSpec matchers
Timecop for testing time

Other goodies

Suspenders also comes with:

The ./bin/setup convention for new developer setup
Rails' flashes set up and in application layout
A few nice time formats set up for localization
Rack::Deflater to compress responses with Gzip
Fast-failing factories

Suspenders fixes several of Rails' insecure defaults:

Suspenders uses Unicorn instead of WEBrick, allowing less verbose Server headers.
Suspenders is configured to pull your application secret key base from an environment variable, which means you won't need to risk placing it in version control.

Heroku

You can optionally create Heroku staging and production apps:

suspenders app --heroku true

This:

Creates a staging and production Heroku app
Sets them as staging and production Git remotes
Configures staging with RACK_ENV and RAILS_ENV environment variables set to staging

Git

This will initialize a new git repository for your Rails app. You can bypass this with the --skip-git option:

suspenders app --skip-git true

GitHub

You can optionally create a GitHub repository for the suspended Rails app. It requires that you have Hub on your system:

curl http://hub.github.com/standalone -sLo ~/bin/hub && chmod +x ~/bin/hub
suspenders app --github organization/project

This has the same effect as running:

hub create organization/project

Dependencies

Suspenders requires Ruby 1.9.2 or greater.

Some gems included in Suspenders have native extensions. You should have GCC installed on your machine before generating an app with Suspenders.

Use OS X GCC Installer for Snow Leopard (OS X 10.6).

Use Command Line Tools for XCode for Lion (OS X 10.7) or Mountain Lion (OS X 10.8).

We use Capybara Webkit for full-stack Javascript integration testing. It requires QT. Instructions for installing QT are here.

PostgreSQL needs to be installed and running for the db:create rake task.

Issues

If you have problems, please create a Github Issue.

Contributing

Please see CONTRIBUTING.md for details.

Credits

Suspenders is maintained and funded by thoughtbot, inc.

The names and logos for thoughtbot are trademarks of thoughtbot, inc.

struex / suspenders