A startup template for Ruby on Rails 4 applications

Way back in January, I wrote a blog post called “Rails has two default stacks”. In it, I discussed how people like to customize the defaults that Ruby on Rails gives you. Your company might prefer Postgres/HAML/RSpec, for example, over the default MySQL/ERB/MiniTest.

There’s an under-used feature of Rails that allows you to automate the creation of your own stack: templates. Check it:

$ rails --help
Usage:

  rails new APP_PATH [options]

Options:

-r, [--ruby=PATH]              # Path to the Ruby binary of your choice
                               # Default: /opt/rubies/ruby-2.0.0-p195/bin/ruby
-m, [--template=TEMPLATE]      # Path to some application template (can be a filesystem path or URL)

Application template? Yep. There’s very little documentation on this feature, unfortunately. There is a work in progress Rails Guide that gives some answers, but it’s not done yet.

Anyway, the TL;DR is this: you can write a little script to help initialize a Rails app just the way you want to. And Rails startup template is exactly that.

Here’s some of the things it gives you out of the box:

1. Adds analytics-ruby, simple_form, uuidtools, rspec, guard-rspec, and bourbon gems, as well as a few more.
2. Creates a new git repository, and optionally a new one on GitHub
3. Sets up foreman for easy environment variable and background service config.
4. Removes include_tree . from your application.css, since the author prefers to require things manually.

There are some other features, as well.

Check it out on GitHub and vote it up on Hacker News.