Modern Rails Template

Description

This is the rails template I used for my Rails 5.2 projects as a freelance developer. Its goal is to allow to begin new rails application easily, with a modern and efficient configuration and with good set of defaults. The project is still very much a work in progress. So do not expect it to be 100% bug free. Contributions, ideas and help are really welcome.

This project is inspired by the template developed by Matt Brictson. Have a look here to compare both.

Requirements

This template currently works with:

• Rails 5.2.x
• PostgreSQL

Installation

Optional.

To make this the default Rails application template on your system, create a ~/.railsrc file with these contents:

--skip-coffee
--webpack
-d postgresql
-T
-m https://raw.githubusercontent.com/damienlethiec/modern-rails-template/master/template.rb

Usage

To generate a Rails application using this template, pass the options below to rails new, like this:

rails new blog \
  --skip-coffee \
  --webpack \
  -d postgresql \
  -T \
  -m https://raw.githubusercontent.com/damienlethiec/modern-rails-template/master/template.rb

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. Ask for which option you want in this project
2. Generate your application files and directories
3. Add useful gems and good configs
4. Add the optional config specified
5. Commit everything to git

What is included?

Below is an extract of what this generator does. You can check all the features by following the code, especially in template.rb and in the Gemfile.

Standard configuration

• Change the default generators config (cf config/initializers/generators.rb)
• Setup I18n for English and French
• Improve the main layout (cf app/views/layouts/application.haml.erb) to include webpack in the asset pipeline
• Create a basic PagesController to have something to show when the app launch
• Add a Procfile for dev and a Procfile for production to manage the different processes you need to manage in a modern web application.
• Add Javascript (ESLint) and CSS (Stylelint) linters with webpack
• Add and configure the friendly_id gem for slugging
• Add and configure the annotate gem to add useful comments in our models
• Add and configure the bullet gem to track N+1 queries
• Add and configure the rails_erd gem to generate automatically a schema of our database relationships
• Add and configure the sidekiq gem for background jobs. You can access the sidekiq dashboard in the app at /sidekiq (don't forget to limit its access in the routes if needed)
• Add and configure rubocop for style and brakeman for security and add them to overcommit git hooks
• Add livereload for view and automatic bundle installs using guard, guard-livereload and guard-bundler
• Add better-errors and xray-rails for easier debugging
• Add awesome-print and table-print for easier exploration in the terminal
• Setup git with git-flow

Additional options

When you launch a new rails app with the template, a few questions will be asked. Answer 'y' or 'yes' to unable the given option.

• If you need authentication, the devise gem can be added and configured directly
• If you also need authorization, pundit can be added and configured too.
• You can choose to use Haml instead of erb
• You can decide to use UUID as the primary key for Active Record
• If you feel adventurous, you can choose to use the komponent gem and build your front-end following the workflow describe in this great article
• You can include tailwindcss in your project. The configure is inspired by the following Gorails episode
• Finally, you can choose to create a Github repository for you project and push it directly.

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 damienlethiec/modern-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.

Contributing

If you want to contribute, please have a look to the issues in this repository and pick one you are interested in. You can then clone the project and submit a pull request. We also happily welcome new idea and, of course, bug reports.