Rails Application Templates

Ever wondered that you run usual rails new my_awesome_app and you get a really fully bootstraped, authentication added, administration added and lot more for you to just start focusing on business logic instead? Or the other scenario is what if you want all your team to use same versions of Gems i.e. Rails, PostgreSQL. This write up is just about that. Cheers. Words from official guides…

Application templates are simple Ruby files containing DSL for adding gems/initializers etc. to your freshly created Rails project or an existing Rails project.

As this is created on top of Thor so all Thor commands are available plus these actions

• gem — add gem to Gemfile
• gem_group — adds group in file
• environment — adds code inside appliaction.rb or in specific environment file.
• initializer
• git — adds git repo
• generate — runs traditional rails g
• after_bundle hook — Yes, as name is self explanatory
• Check all options Rails Official Guides

According to me this is lot to get a quick great start. What I would like to add into my starting application is…

• pg
• activeadmin
• devise
• bootstrap
• set root to some controller index 🙂

Lets quickly look at deadsimple example.

def add_gems
 gem 'pg'
 gem 'activeadmin'
 gem 'cancancan'
 gem 'bootstrap'
end
def add_announcements
  generate "model Announcement published_at:datetime  announcement_type name description:text"
  route "resources :announcements, only: [:index]"
end
def add_models_to_admin
  files = (Dir.entries Dir.pwd << "/app/models/").reject {|f|  File.directory?(f) }
  files.delete "concerns"
  files.delete "application_record.rb"
  files.each do |mod|
    class_name = mod.split('.').first.classify
    generate "active_admin:resource #{class_name}"
  end
end
def add_activeadmin
  generate "active_admin:install"
  inject_into_file("config/initializers/active_admin.rb", "config.site_title = 'Rails.application.class.parent_name'", after: "ActiveAdmin.setup do |config|")
end
def add_seed_data
  insert_into_file("db/seeds.rb", "User.create!(email: 'user@example.com', password: 'password', password_confirmation: 'password') if Rails.env.development?")
end
def stop_spring
  run "spring stop"
end

In above we just declared some functions to be called later you can call in any sequence but in this particular case we will do something like this

add_gems
after_bundle do
 stop_spring
 add_users
 add_announcements  
 add_bootstrap
 add_activeadmin
 add_seed_data
 rails_command "db:drop" 
 rails_command "db:create"
 rails_command "db:migrate"
 rails_command "db:seed"
 add_models_to_admin
 #This will initialize and commit all new changes in git 
 git :init
 git add: "."
 git commit: %Q{ -m 'First commit' }
end

Save all the code in my_awesome_template.rb and now you can run same rails new command like this