Minimalistic web app template

One-file backend, one-file frontend

Backed by Sinatra and optionally Grape for APIs.

Single-page client app with Backbone.js and Bootstrap.

Great for demos and quick hacking. Production use at your own risk.

What you get

Back-end

Sinatra and Grape
Unicorn server
ActiveRecord
Ready to deploy on Heroku
Database migrations with rake db:migrate
A Rails-like console with rake console

Front-end

Bootstrap
Backbone.js
Lo-dash
jQuery

What you don't get (by design)

A testing framework (but it's easy to add if you need one)
Well-organized models, views, controllers, presenters...
CoffeeScript. Just good old Javascript straight into views/index.erb.
LESS or SASS. And guess where your CSS goes?

Usage

Create an .env file with the following:

# the URL of your application database
DATABASE_URL=postgres://localhost/app_name

Run with foreman:

$ foreman start -p 5000

Development

The two files

All the frontend stuff goes in views/index.erb

All the backend stuff goes in app.rb. The root route should render index.erb which loads your single-page app, and other routes should expose a JSON api that the app talks to.

Rake tasks

Remember to always run these with foreman, or your environment variables will be ignored: foreman run rake task_name

rake db:migrate and rake db:rollback run database migrations, à-la Rails
rake console opens a shell into the app, just like rails console
rake routes lists the routes exposed by the App