Rails 7 Boilerplate

A mildly opinionated starting point for rails projects based on good practices and clean code.

Stack

Built on...

• Rails 7.1.2
• Ruby 3.2.2
• PostgreSQL 15
• Hotwire
• Tailwind (with Tailwind Forms)
• Bun
• Stimulus
• Good Job (background queue)
• Active Storage (S3)

Gems & Packages

With these pre-installed...

• Devise
• RSpec
• FactoryBot
• Standardrb
• Brakeman
• Faker
• CanCanCan
• Animate.css (https://animate.style/)
• Font Awesome 6.2.0 Free Icons (https://fontawesome.com/search?o=r&m=free)
• Letter Opener (https://github.com/ryanb/letter_opener)
• Bullet
• Sitemap Generator

Setup

Fork the project and do a find and replace for boilerplate

rails db:create db:migrate db:seed

./bin/dev

The default user will be seeded with the following credentials

Email: test@test.com Password: test1234test

Credentials

Boilerplate uses the rails default of multi-environment encrypted credentials. Follow these steps to get set up.

1. Delete config/credentials
2. run rails credentials:edit --environment production (for each environment)
3. Populate each config file with the following...1

secret_key_base: XXXX

mailer:
  support_email: support@boilerplate.com
  noreply_email: noreply@boilerplate.com
  username: XXXX
  password: XXXX
  domain: XXXX
  address: XXXX
  port: 456

amazon:
  access_key_id: ""
  secret_access_key: ""
  region: ""
  bucket: ""

4. Replace values with your own credentials!

Features

Here's what you get out of the box...

• A nice home page
• Responsive login and registration pages
• A responsive authenticated Dashboard with navigation
• UUIDs instead of incremental IDs
• Default User model with validations
• Validates user passwords against a list of common passwords for enhanced security (lib/common_passwords.txt)
• Validates acceptance of terms and conditions checkbox on user creation
• Default Devise installation with Confirmable and Lockable enabled
• Pre-styled Stimulus flash notifications
• A Procfile for Heroku deployments
• Empty partials for app/views/shared/_analytics.html.erb and app/views/shared/_metatags.html.erb to drop in analytics (consider using Plausible.io instead of GA!) and opengraph tags
• A favicon
• Tailwind CSS with Tailwind Forms and Tailwind Typography plugin
• A default minimalist Docker config for development
• Good Job for a background worker
• Font Awesome Icons (https://fontawesome.com/search?o=r&m=free)
• User has first_name, last_name, and admin columns
• Privacy Policy and T&C pages
• error_message_on(resource, :field) let's you render per-field validations
• user.full_name method
• A before action of require_turbo_frame_request to stop users accessing pages that should only be loaded via turbo frame (e.g. modals)
• An onboarding modal with turbo frames (easy to make multistep, just link to the next turbo frame)
• Cancancan installed with default abilites set up for admin
• Bullet set up to catch n+1s early
• Performance tweaks for a high Lighthouse score out of the box
• Sitemap Generator gem for dynamic sitemaps - rails sitemap:refresh
• Active Storage configured with S3 to host the sitemap (since ephemeral storage with Heroku)

Configurations

Things that have been changed from their defaults...

• Devise default minimum password length has been increased from 6 to 8 characters
• Devise allows unconfirmed access for the first 14 days (to reduce user friction in trying out the product)
• Fixtures have been replaced with FactoryBot
• Tests have been replaced with RSpec
• Devise Confirmable and Lockable have been enabled on the User model
• Procfile (for Heroku deploys) runs rails db:migrate on each deploy release
• The base ApplicationJob class is configured with default strategies for discarding on deserialization error (a record not being found), retrying on deadlock, and retrying 3 times on a standard error before handing off to the worker to discard.
• Tailwind and assets/stylesheets/application.tailwind.css is configured with PostCSS to make it easier to add custom CSS. Tailwind Forms is also enabled.
• UUIDs are configured instead of incremental IDs as primary keys
• .gitignore will ignore database dumps, .DS_Store files and .env files
• Docker IP range has been whitelisted in config/environments/development.rb to allow the web console to work properly in development.
• Enable Stimulus debug mode in development
• Faker unique generator is reset after each test spec to ensure unique values don't run out
• Sends devise mail through GoodJob in a dedicated :devise queue
• Configures ActiveJob for test environment
• Configures Capybara to use :rack_test for most test, and :selenium_headless for js tests. Config in spec_helper.rb
• More pleasing error messages set up in en.yml for Cancancan
• Disallows OpenAI's GPTBot web crawler in the robots.txt file
• Force HTTPS, and redirect https traffic - https://www.stackhawk.com/blog/rails-http-strict-transport-security-guide-what-it-is-and-how-to-enable-it/
• Enables text compression with Rack::Deflator for better performance
• Adds default metatags for SEO in app/views/shared/metatags.html.erb
• Removes trailing slashes from urls - https://tosbourn.com/ruby-on-rails-seo/#remove-trailing-slashes

Launch checklist

Before you launch, don't forget to...

1. Rename the app
2. Set config variables for your support email and other config
3. Add your analytics in views/shared/_analytics.html.erb
4. Add your metatags in views/shared/_metatags.html.erb

Tests & Linting

rspec
standardrb --fix
brakeman

Deploy

Boilerplate is configured with a Procfile for Heroku deployment Alternative PaaS deploys coming soon...