Firestarter

Firestarter is the Rails application generator used at Subvisual.

Table of Contents

• Installation
• Gemfile
• Other goodies
• Git
• Dependencies
• Issues
• Contributing
• Credits
• License

Installation

First install the Firestarter gem:

gem install gb-firestarter

Then run:

firestarter <project_name>

This will create a new Rails application in ./<project_name>. By default, Firestarter will use Rails 4.2.0 to generate new applications. You can override this by setting the RAILS_VERSION environment variable when running the generator:

RAILS_VERSION=4.1.16 firestarter <project_name>

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

Gemfile

To see the latest and greatest gems, look at Firestarter's template Gemfile, which will be appended to the default generated <project_name>/Gemfile.

It includes application gems like:

• dotenv for loading environment variables from a file;
• jQuery Rails for jQuery;
• Postgres for access to the Postgres database;
• Pry Rails for performing console operations;
• Puma to serve HTTP requests.

And gems only for staging and production like:

• Rack Timeout to abort requests that are taking too long;
• Rails 12 Factor to make running Rails applications easier on Heroku.

And development gems like:

• Better Errors for debugging.

And testing gems like:

• Capybara and Capybara Webkit for integration testing;
• Factory Girl for generating test data (and seeds);
• RSpec for unit testing;
• Timecop for testing time.

Other goodies

Firestarter also includes:

• 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;
• A low database connection pool limit;
• Safe binstubs;
• t() and l() in specs without prefixing with I18n.

Firestarter fixes several of Rails' insecure defaults:

• Firestarter uses Puma instead of WEBrick, allowing less verbose Server headers;
• Firestarter 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.

Git

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

firestarter <project_name> --skip-git true

Dependencies

Firestarter requires Ruby 2.1.0 or greater. The generated project will be set to use Ruby 2.3.1 by default.

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

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

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

We use Capybara Webkit for full-stack Javascript integration testing. It requires Qt. Instructions for installing Qt are here. WARNING: Qt 5.6 dropped the Qt WebKit module, in favor of the new Qt WebEngine module. As such, the installed version of Qt must be <= 5.5.

PostgreSQL needs to be installed and running for the db:create rake task. For OS X you can install it through Homebrew or by installing the Postgres application.

Issues

If you have any problems with this project, please create a Github Issue.

Contributing

Please see CONTRIBUTING for details.

Credits

Firestarter is maintained by Subvisual.

Firestarter is largely inspired by thoughtbot's suspenders, so thank you thoughtbot.

License

Firestarter is Copyright © 2014-2016 GB-Software As A Service, Lda. It is free software and may be redistributed under the terms specified in the LICENSE file.