Eureka – Rails application generator/template

That’s the Rails application generator I use every time I start to build the “Next Big Idea”™.

It includes some useful plugins and gems and allow some customization through the config.yml file and also asking you some questions throughout the generation process.

What’s included?

You can configure Eureka using the file config.yml. In this file you can specify the Rails version you want to use, the database engine (mysql, postgresql or sqlite) and the git branches you want to create (and which one is checked out by default).

The default plugins are:

• fast_remote_cache
• hashdown
• jrails
• live_validations
• query_trace
• rails_indexes
• scrooge
• stringex
• time-warp
• typus

The default gems are:

(All environments)

• authlogic
• cache-money
• formtastic
• memcache-client
• paperclip
• searchlogic
• will_paginate

(Development environment only)

• bullet
• inaction_mailer
• rack-bug

(Test environment only)

• faker
• factory_girl
• metric_fu
• mocha
• rspec
• rspec-rails

The generator will also:

• create a gitignore file
• remove some unnecessary files and Prototype/Scriptaculous
• download jQuery
• create a staging environment
• configure Rack::Bug as middleware
• create basic configuration files for database and memcached
• create some initializers (for cache-money, some date and time formats and others – see files/config/initializers)
• ask if you want to install the gems (using rake gems:install for all environments)
• ask if you want to unpack the gems to vendor (using rake gems:unpack for all environments)
• call rspec and typus default generators
• ask if you want to use nifty-generators and, if so, generate layout and authentication basic code through it (it will use HAML by default)
• copy some basic Capistrano recipes for a simple production setup using Passenger and Memcached (see utils/capistrano.rb)
• create basic rake tasks for coverage, memcached local instance startup, database population and metric_fu
• ask if you want to use New Relic RPM and, if so, configure it
• ask if you want to use Hoptoad and, if so, configure it

Usage

First, clone the project (mine or your fork). If you want, modify the config.yml to better suit your needs or template.rb to change something the generator does.

Then, just execute the following command:

$ rails my_app_name -m /complete/path/to/eureka/template.rb

Throughout the generation process you’ll be asked some questions, like what database you want to use and so on.

Feel free to fork the project and customize it as you want. Bug reports are extremely welcome.

Credits

Eureka is based on great work done by:

• Mike Gunderloy
• Ryan Bates
• and others

Also, thanks everyone who made the plugins and gems used on the generator and my everyday work.