SUMMARY

Spree is a complete open source commerce solution for Ruby on Rails. It was originally developed by Sean Schofield and is now maintained by a dedicated core team. You can find out more about by visiting the Spree e-commerce project page.

Spree actually consists of several different gems, each of which are maintained in a single repository and documented in a single set of online documentation. By requiring the Spree gem you automatically require all of the necessary dependency gems. Those gems are as follows:

• spree_api
• spree_auth
• spree_core
• spree_dash
• spree_promo
• spree_sample

All of the gems are designed to work together to provide a fully functional e-commerce platform. It is also possible, however, to use only the pieces you are interested in. So for example, you could use just the barebones spree_core gem and perhaps combine it with your own custom authorization scheme instead of using spree_auth.

Using the Gem

Start by adding the gem to your existing Rails 3.x application's Gemfile

gem 'spree'

Update your bundle

$ bundle install

Use the install generator to do the basic setup. The install generator will prompt you to run migrations, setup some basic data, and load sample products, orders, etc.

$ rails g spree:site

To auto accept all prompts while running the install generator, pass -A as an option

$ rails g spree:site -A

If you chose to ignore the prompts while running the basic install generator you can manually run migrations and load basic data with the following commands

$ bundle exec rake db:migrate
$ bundle exec rake db:seed

To manually load sample products, orders, etc., run the following rake task

$ bundle exec rake spree_sample:load

Peformance

Rails 3.1 introduced a concept known as the asset pipeline. Unfortunately it results in poor performance when running your site in development mode (production mode is unaffected.) You may want to run the following command when testing locally in development mode

$ bundle exec rake assets:precompile:nondigest

Using the precompile rake task in development will prevent any changes to asset files from being automatically included in when you reload the page. You must re-run the precompile task for changes to become available.

Browse Store

http://localhost:nnnn

Browse Admin Interface

http://localhost:nnnn/admin

Working with the edge source (latest and greatest features)

The source code is essentially a collection of gems. Spree is meant to be run within the context of Rails application. You can easily create a sandbox application inside of your cloned source directory for testing purposes.

1. Clone the Git repo

    git clone git://github.com/spree/spree.git spree
    cd spree
   

2. Install the gem dependencies

    bundle install
   

3. Create a sandbox Rails application for testing purposes (and automatically perform all necessary database setup)

    bundle exec rake sandbox
   

4. Start the server

    cd sandbox
    rails server
   

Performance

You may noticed that your Spree store runs slowly in development mode. This is a side-effect of how Rails works in development mode which is to continuous reload your Ruby objects on each request. The introduction of the asset pipeline in Rails 3.1 made default performance in development mode significantly worse. There are, however, a few tricks to speeding up performance.

You can recompile your assets as follows:

    $ bundle exec rake assets:precompile RAILS_ENV=development

If you want to remove precompiled assets (recommended before you commit to Git and push your changes) use the following rake task:

    $ bundle exec rake assets:clean

Running Tests

If you want to run all the tests across all the gems then

$ cd spree
$ bundle exec rake

Each gem contains its own series of tests, and for each directory, you need to do a quick one-time creation of a test application and then you can use it to run the tests. For example, to run the tests for the core project.

$ cd core
$ bundle exec rake test_app

If you're working on multiple facets of Spree, you may want to run this command at the root of the Spree project to generate test applications for all the facets:

$ bundle exec rake test_app

You can run all of the tests inside a facet by also running this command:

$ cd core
$ bundle exec rake

If you want to run specs for only a single spec file

$ bundle exec rspec spec/models/state_spec.rb

If you want to run a particular line of spec

$ bundle exec rspec spec/models/state_spec.rb:7

Contributing

Spree is an open source project. We encourage contributions. Please see the contributors guidelines before contributing.