Description

This is the application template that I use for my Rails 5.2 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:

• Rails 4.2.x
• Rails 5.0.x
• Rails 5.1.x

Requirements

This template currently works with:

• Rails 5.2.x
• PostgreSQL
• chromedriver

If you need help setting up a Ruby development environment, check out my Rails OS X Setup Guide.

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/mattbrictson/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 staging and production environments. It will prompt you for this information in order to pre-configure your app, so be ready to provide:

1. The git URL of your (freshly created and empty) Bitbucket/GitHub repository
2. The hostname of your staging server
3. 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/mattbrictson/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

What does it do?

The template will perform the following steps:

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

What is included?

These gems are added to the standard Rails stack

• Core
  • active_type – for building simple and effective form/service objects
  • sidekiq – Redis-based job queue implementation for Active Job
• Configuration
  • dotenv – in place of the Rails secrets.yml
• Utilities
  • annotate – auto-generates schema documentation
  • autoprefixer-rails – automates cross-browser CSS compatibility
  • awesome_print – try ap instead of puts
  • better_errors – useful error pages with interactive stack traces
  • guard – runs tests as you develop; mandatory for effective TDD
  • livereload – magically refreshes browsers whenever you save a file
  • rubocop – enforces Ruby code style
  • xray-rails – inspect view partials in the browser
• Deployment via Capistrano (optional)
  • capistrano-mb – capistrano recipes
  • unicorn – the industry-standard Rails server
  • unicorn-worker-killer – to manage memory use
• Security
  • brakeman and bundler-audit – detect security vulnerabilities
• Testing
  • mocha – excellent mocking for Test::Unit/Minitest
  • simplecov – code coverage reports
  • shoulda – shortcuts for common ActiveRecord tests

Postmark

I like to use Postmark for transactional email, and so I’ve included the postmark-rails gem and configured it in environments/production.rb. Make sure to sign up for a Postmark account to get an API key, or switch to your own preferred email provider before deploying your app.

Bootstrap integration (optional)

Bootstrap-related features are opt-in. To apply these to your project, answer “yes” when prompted.

• Bootstrap-themed scaffold templates
• Application layout that includes Bootstrap-style navbar and boilerplate
• View helpers for generating common Bootstrap markup

Other tweaks that patch over some Rails shortcomings

• A much-improved bin/setup script
• Log rotation so that development and test Rails logs don’t grow out of control

Plus lots of documentation for your project

• README.md
• PROVISIONING.md and DEPLOYMENT.md for Capistrano (optional)

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 mattbrictson/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 to learn more.