New gem: copy_rails_tutorial

People have complained that it takes far longer to create a basic app in Rails than in Drupal, PHP, and other technologies. I’ve decided to do something about it by streamlining the process of starting a basic app.

Check out my new Ruby gem copy_rails_tutorial. It copies Michael Hartl’s Rails Tutorial Sample App for use in your projects and provides a great productivity advantage over starting a new app completely from scratch. The inputs are a base name (to replace “sample_app_rails_4”) and app name (to replace “SampleApp”). CopyRailsTutorial has several commands that you can execute from the normal Unix/Linux shell - copy_rails_tutorial_all, copy_rails_tutorial_static, and copy_rails_tutorial_users. RSpec, Cucumber, Guard, Spork, and Twitter Bootstrap formatting are all included out of the box.

The “all” mode copies everything from the Rails Tutorial sample app - static pages, users, microposts, and relationships. After you run the setup.sh script added by this gem, all tests will pass. (Please note that for all other modes, you must follow the instructions in the notes/to_do.txt file to get all tests to pass.)

The “static mode” includes the static pages but not the users, micro posts, or relationships. The “users” mode includes static pages and user functionality but not micro posts or relationships.

Now you no longer need to plow through chapters 3 through 9 in Rails tutorial to start an app with static pages and users. If you use a Vagrant Box with pre-installed Ruby on Rails (with Linux, OS X, or Windows as a host OS), you can start off with a computer lacking Ruby on Rails and have a basic Rails app up and running in minutes instead of hours. This will be handy for Startup Weekend, 24-hour web site challenges, and other situations that don’t tolerate a leisurely pace.

Jason,

This is cool, but have you checked out "Hobo"? I can have a basic app, complete with user authentication, invitation emails, etc. in less than 5 minutes from the time I type "hobo new my_app" till I type "rails server". If you need customization of the basic app's appearance or database (default is sqlite3) it may take another 2 minutes. They have also improved on the rails model and have totally automated migration. Give it a try.

Don Ziesig

Thanks, Don. I never heard of the Hobo gem, and I’m surprised that I’ve never heard of it. I’ll be sure to try it out given how much work it can save. It’s great to find out that I’m not the only one who has been looking for a way to streamline the process of STARTING a project by creating a generic site that can be customized.

Hobo is the one from http://railsapps.github.io/ ?

It’s been some time since I’ve visited the page, I didn’t knew about it.

But I’ve heard good about Rails Composer: https://github.com/RailsApps/rails-composer/