The Rails framework has always fascinated me in the way that it works, the beauty, the elegance and the way it makes rapid application development very easy has always struck me as a work of genius. While all these make Rails a beauty to use, I've always found myself lost in all the seeming magic that Rails employs to make all the little bits work efficiently.
Bijou is my attempt to understand Rails better by building a simple Ruby + Rack powered web framework. It comes with some of rails features built in albeit not as polished.
Add this line to your application's Gemfile:
gem 'bijou'And then execute:
$ bundle
Or install it yourself as:
$ gem install bijou
When creating a new Bijou application, a few things need to be setup and a few rules adhered to. Bijou follows the same folder structure as a typical rails app with all of the model, view and controller code packed inside of an app folder, configuration based code placed inside a config folder and the main database file in a db folder. Here is a link to a to-do app built using Bijou with the correct folder setup, it can be forked, cloned and edited to suit other purposes.
In order to run a Bijou app, it is assumed that a config.ru file exists in the root directory and all the needed files have been required here.
Example config.ru file:
- Note that the 'PATH' constant is required and must point to the current file directory as the gem uses this internally to find and link folders.
PATH = __dir__
require "bijou"
$LOAD_PATH << File.join(PATH, "..", "app", "controllers")
$LOAD_PATH << File.join(PATH, "..", "app", "models")
Dir["../app/models/*.rb"].each { |file| require file }
module MyApp
class Application < Bijou::Application
end
end
BijouApp = MyApp::Application.new
require File.expand_path __FILE__, "./config/routes"
run BijouAppThe route file should be required in the config.ru file after the application has been initialized and before the rack 'run' command is called.
Example route file:
BijouApp.routes.draw do
root "pages#index"
get "about", to: "pages#about"
get "contact", to: "pages#contact"
get "signup", to: "pages#signup"
post "signup", to: "users#create"
put "user/:id", to: "users#update"
delete "user/:id", to: "agendas#destroy"
endBijou implements a lightweight orm that makes it easy to query the database using ruby objects. It supports only sqlite3. Models are placed inside the app/models folder.
Example model file:
class App < Bijou::BijouRecord
map_model_to_table :todos
table_property column_name: :name, type: :text, nullable: false
table_property column_name: :done, type: :boolean, default: false
create_table
endControllers are placed inside the app/controllers folder.
Example controller file:
class PagesController < Bijou::BaseController
def index
@todos = Todo.all
end
def about
end
def show
@todo = Todo.find(params[:id])
end
endView templates are mapped to controller actions and must assume the same nomenclature as their respective actions.Erbuis is used as the templating engine and files which are views are required to have the .erb file extension after the .html extension. Views are placed inside the app/views folder. A default layout file is required and must be placed inside the app/views/layouts folder. It is also required that this file is named application.html.erb and has a yield command.
Example file:
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
<meta charset="UTF-8">
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1">
<title>My New App</title>
</head>
<body>
<%= yield %>
</body>
</html>Test files are placed inside the spec folder and have been split into two sub folders, one for unit tests and the other for integration tests. You can run the tests from your command line client by typing rspec spec
After checking out the repo, run bin/setup to install dependencies. Then, run rake spec to run the tests. You can also run bin/console for an interactive prompt that will allow you to experiment.
To install this gem onto your local machine, run bundle exec rake install. To release a new version, update the version number in version.rb, and then run bundle exec rake release, which will create a git tag for the version, push git commits and tags, and push the .gem file to rubygems.org.
Bug reports and pull requests are welcome on GitHub at https://github.com/andela-cdaniel/bijou. This project is intended to be a safe, welcoming space for collaboration, and contributors are expected to adhere to the Contributor Covenant code of conduct.
The gem is available as open source under the terms of the MIT License.