Interactive "rails new"

A May Of WTFs
69

What are some small steps that you feel might get the ball rolling on that project?

  1. Perhaps rails new could record what it did (and didn’t do) in an install.yml file.
  2. rails new --config=install.yml could make it easy to copy the options from a previous installation.
  3. Overtime, we could add comments to that file to explain how to change a decision manually (for example to switch from mysql to postgres or to add or get rid of turbolinks).
  4. There could be an incremental process of automating some of those choices by editing the install.yml file and running rake install:update. There would probably be some low-hanging fruit but other options might be more difficult.

As you say, Betsy, this might take a while to complete and an awkward period where install:update can update somethings but not others but the first two steps would be valuable on their own.

I was thinking of application.rb (and the Gemfile) as being downstream from this process.

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