Rails Template

A rails template of common tasks I do when I create a new Rails project.

See Creating and Customizing Rails Generators & Templates

Usage

For a new project:

rails new myapp -m https://github.com/jch/rails_templates/raw/master/rails.template

For an existing project:

rake rails:template LOCATION=https://github.com/jch/rails_templates/raw/master/rails.template

Overview

The template does the following:

• adds commonly used gems
• setup my preferred test_helper
• remove prototypejs
• conditionally add Hoptoad
• initialize local git repository
• conditionally add to github
• conditionally add to heroku

Github Setup

In order to create new projects to Github, you'll need to save your Github API token to ~/.github_token. You can find your API token at your Account Admin page. I also recommend changing the permissions to that file to 600.

chmod 600 ~/.github_token

Whenever you change your password, you'll have to update your API token.

Heroku Setup

In order to automatically add projects to Heroku, you'll need to have the heroku gem installed before you run the templates:

gem install heroku

The script will prompt you for an application name. If the heroku app was successfully created, a 'heroku' remote will be added for you. However, if the app failed to create, no remote repo will be added and you'll need to do it manually yourself.

Backup Setup

Installs backup gem. Defaults to gzip and save backups to S3. Common backup rake tasks included.

rake rails:template LOCATION=https://github.com/jch/rails_templates/blob/master/templates/backup.rb

Resources

I learned about Rails application templates through a variety of resources. I recommend reading through all of them because they all have their own useful tidbits. Here's a list of links:

• Creating and Customizing Rails Generators & Templates
• Thor Actions - usable in your templates
• Application Templates in Rails 3 by Ben Scofield
• Rails Templates by Pratik Naik