wolfpack-digital/rails-template

Description

Ruby on Rails application template used by Wolfpack-Digital.

For older versions of Rails, use the following branches:

• Rails 5.2.x
• Rails 6.1.x

Requirements

This template currently works with:

• Rails 7.0.x
• PostgreSQL

If you need help setting up a Ruby development environment, check out this 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/Wolfpack-Digital/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/Wolfpack-Digital/rails-template/master/template.rb

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

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
  • sidekiq – Redis-based job queue implementation for Active Job
• Configuration
  • dotenv – in place of the Rails secrets.yml
• Utilities
  • annotate – auto-generates schema documentation
  • amazing_print – try ap instead of puts
  • better_errors – useful error pages with interactive stack traces
  • letter_opener - open email in browser
  • overcommit - git hook manager
  • rubocop – enforces Ruby code style
• Security
  • brakeman and bundler-audit – detect security vulnerabilities
• Testing
  • simplecov – code coverage reports
  • shoulda – shortcuts for common ActiveRecord tests

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

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 Wolfpack-Digital/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.

Inspired by rails-template

Contributing

See CONTRIBUTING.md